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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T05:17:36+00:00

Lets say you have a DataTable that has columns of id, cost, qty: DataTable

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Lets say you have a DataTable that has columns of “id”, “cost”, “qty”:

DataTable dt = new DataTable();
dt.Columns.Add("id", typeof(int));
dt.Columns.Add("cost", typeof(double));
dt.Columns.Add("qty", typeof(int));

And it’s keyed on “id”:

dt.PrimaryKey = new DataColumn[1] { dt.Columns["id"] };

Now what we are interested in is the cost per quantity. So, in other words if you had a row of: 

id | cost  | qty
----------------
42 | 10.00 | 2

The cost per quantity is 5.00.

My question then is, given the preceeding table, assume it’s constructed with many thousands of rows, and you’re interested in the top 3 cost per quantity rows. The information needed is the id, cost per quantity. You cannot use LINQ.

In SQL it would be trivial; how BEST (most efficiently) would you accomplish it in C# without LINQ?

Update: Seeking answers that do not modify the table.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’m not sure if this is best, but it beats sorting and then picking the top three elements which has time complexity O(n log n).

    You can use a priority queue to filter the top three elements. Information about .Net priority queue implementations is available here.

    The basic idea is to insert the first three elements of your data table into the priority queue. You then successively add all of remaining elements, removing the top element after each add. The elements remaining in the priority queue (heap) after that will be the top three elements.

    No modification to the table is needed, in terms of adding another column (you just need to define the relative ordering / priority criteria) and doesn’t change the order the table elements. Time complexity will be O(n log 3) = O(n).

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