Question

Ok so its easier to give an example and hopefully some has a solution:

I have table that holds bids:

ID | companyID | userID | contractID | bidAmount | dateAdded

Below is an example set of rows that could be in the table:

ID | companyID | userID | contractID | bidAmount | dateAdded
--------------------------------------------------------------
10 | 2         | 1      | 94         | 1.50      | 1309933407
9  | 2         | 1      | 95         | 1.99      | 1309933397
8  | 2         | 1      | 96         | 1.99      | 1309933394
11 | 103       | 1210   | 96         | 1.98      | 1309947237
12 | 2         | 1      | 96         | 1.97      | 1309947252

Ok so what I would like to do is to be able to get all the info (like by using * in a normal select statement) the lowest bid for each unique contractID.

So I would need the following rows:

ID = 10 (for contractID = 94)
ID = 9 (for contractID - 95)
ID = 12 (for contractID = 96)

I want to ignore all the others. I thought about using DISTINCT, but i haven’t been able to get it to return all the columns, only the column I’m using for distinct.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks,
Jeff

Answer 1

select *
from mytable main
where bidAmount = (
    select min(bidAmount)
    from mytable
    where contractID = main.contractID)

Note that this will return multiple rows if there is more than one record sharing the same minimum bid.