Question

If I have a table of data like this

tableid    author     book                 pubdate
1          1          The Hobbit           1923
2          1          Fellowship           1925
3          2          Foundation Trilogy   1947
4          2          I Robot              1942
5          3          Frankenstein         1889
6          3          Frankenstein 2       1894

Is there a query that would get me the following without having to use a temp table, table variable or cte?

tableid    author     book                 pubdate
1          1          The Hobbit           1923
4          2          I Robot              1942
5          3          Frankenstein         1889

So I want min(ranking) grouping by person and ending up with book for that min(ranking) value.

OK, the data I gave initially was flawed. Instead of a ranking column I’ll have a date column. I need the book published earliest by author.

Answer 1

Missed that a CTE was not valid (but not sure why). How about as a subquery?

SELECT tableid, author, book, pubdate
FROM
(
    SELECT 
        tableid, author, book, pubdate, 
        rn = ROW_NUMBER() OVER 
        (
            PARTITION BY author
            ORDER BY pubdate
        )
    FROM dbo.src -- replace this with the real table name
) AS x
WHERE rn = 1
ORDER BY tableid;

Original:

;WITH x AS
(
    SELECT 
        tableid, author, book, pubdate, 
        rn = ROW_NUMBER() OVER 
        (
            PARTITION BY author
            ORDER BY pubdate
        )
    FROM dbo.src -- replace this with the real table name
)
SELECT tableid, author, book, pubdate
    FROM x
    WHERE rn = 1
    ORDER BY tableid;

If you want to return multiple rows when there is a tie for earliest book, use RANK() in place of ROW_NUMBER(). In the case of a tie and you only want to return one row, you need to add additional tie breaker columns to the ORDER BY within OVER().