Question

I have a table in a db that has an int field, a non-unique id field plus others. I need to sort by the int field then get the top X distinct id fields.

So for example if these are my table values (sorted by the intfld):

id  intfld
CC  1
AA  2
CC  3
AA  4
FF  4
OO  5
EE  6
KK  6

And I wanted the top 3 id’s the returned values would be CC,AA,FF.

I tried distinct and group by but I don’t think they will work. Maybe I’m missing something obvious since I don’t work in SQL a lot.

Can I do this with a sql statement?

Thanks.

Edit: I’m using Oracle.

Answer 1

This should get you on the right track:

SELECT 
  ID AS MyDistinctValue, 
  MIN(intfld) AS MySort
FROM
  MyTable
GROUP BY ID
ORDER BY MySort