Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!tuvie!hpuviea!gernot
From: gernot@hpuviea.UUCP (Gernot Kunz)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: Simple SQL question
Keywords: SQL
Message-ID: <1217@hpuviea.UUCP>
Date: 21 Nov 89 08:18:40 GMT
References: <98813@ti-csl.csc.ti.com> <1989Nov19.200834.266@mrspoc.Transact.COM>
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Vienna,Austria
Lines: 38

itkin@mrspoc.Transact.COM (Steven M. List) writes:

>hemphill@csc000.csc.ti.com (Charles Hemphill) writes:

>>	List the 10 oldest employees.

>	select name, birthdate
>	from employee
>	order by birthdate desc
>and pipe the result through "head -10"?
>Otherwise, there's no way to set a limit in SQL.

Oops, what a tricky UNIX hack to circumvent an obviously
missing SQL functionality. In ORACLE you could do THIS:

       create table temptable(name ..., birthdate ...);

       insert into temptable
       select name, birthdate
       from employee
       order by birthdate desc;

       select name,birthdate
       from temptable
       where rownum <= 10 ;

and remain in pure SQL. It requires a temporary table, though.

---
Gernot Kunz				gernot@hpuviea.UUCP 
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