Question

This is an Oracle question.

I need to find the top 5 biggest values in a series of records. Say I have 2000 records, and there is a column that holds number values in each record. I need to check this number field and only select the top 5 biggest.

So if I have these values in my number column

22
3
44
2
23
9
4
2
99

Then the following would be returned

22
44
23
9
99

I’m currently having to parse the number value from the field as it is a string. I parse it with the following

REGEXP_SUBSTR(SUBSTR(ADDITIONAL_INFO, 1 ,
              INSTR(ADDITIONAL_INFO, ',', 1,1)), '[0-9]+') "CELLS"

I’m thinking there might be looping and if else selection involved. If this were C# I could do this in a few minutes. But the Oracle syntax is throwing me off.

Please help.

Answer 1

You could try:

SELECT * FROM
    (SELECT ADDITIONAL_INFO FROM your_table
     ORDER BY to_number(ADDITIONAL_INFO) DESC) r
WHERE rownum <= 5