Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncrcae!scottj
From: scottj@ncrcae.Columbia.NCR.COM (L. Scott Johnson)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: Simple SQL question
Keywords: SQL
Message-ID: <5394@ncrcae.Columbia.NCR.COM>
Date: 21 Nov 89 12:45:47 GMT
References: <98813@ti-csl.csc.ti.com>
Reply-To: scottj@ncrcae.Columbia.NCR.COM (L. Scott Johnson)
Organization: NCR Corp., Engineering & Manufacturing - Columbia, SC
Lines: 20

In article <98813@ti-csl.csc.ti.com> hemphill@ti.com (Charles Hemphill) writes:
>
>Can the following type of question be answered with an SQL expression?
>
>	List the 10 oldest employees.
>
>Basically, I'd like the top N tuples from an ordered table.  I don't
>want to use embedded SQL.

Since the table is ordered, you could use the following in ORACLE (which
supplies a column called rownum, I'm not sure how or if other products offer
this feature):

	select empname
	from emp
	where rownum <=10

Hope this helps (despite it's lack of generality)
----------
L. Scott