Question

I have a table “articles” that has a column “company” which has list of companies or an article type – crappy I know, but it’s not my DB. 🙂 Let’s say there are n articles for each type. I need to select the first article (based on year, or any other criteria) that is of the type. Something like this:

select * from details where (company = 'aaa' or company = 'bbb' or ...)

I know what the types are, so they can be hardcoded. I need to limit only the first article for each type. Thanks!

EDIT

given the sample data:

id  company  copy   issue
------------------------
1   apple    'abc'  NULL
2   bmw      'abc'  NULL
3   ibm      'abc'  NULL
4   news     'abc'  2
5   news     'abc'  3
6   seagate  'abc'  NULL
7   events   'abc'  1
8   features 'abc'  5
9   samsung  'abc'  NULL

I need rows 4, 7, 8.

EDIT2

Sorry if I wasn’t clear. Essentially the table contains two different types of data. One is company info, and one is article info. Basically I need to do this:

select * from articles where company = "news" order by issue limit 1;
select * from articles where company = "events" order by issue limit 1;
select * from articles where company = "features" order by issue limit 1;

but with a single query.

Answer 1

Something like this perhaps

select * from details d
where company in ('news', 'events', 'features')
and not exists (
    select 1 from details d_
    where d_.company = d.company
    and d_.id < d.id -- provide your sortable criteria here
)

Example here – http://sqlfiddle.com/#!2/bb8f2/6