Getting the first row from a select

[Quoted] [Quoted] [Quoted] [Quoted] [Quoted] [Quoted] [Quoted] [Quoted] [Quoted] Maybe I'm missing something obvious....

I'm trying to write a VB program that will get the first record from a query [Quoted] something like:

select * from COMPANY where COMPANY_NAME >= 'whatever was entered';

The user will enter part of a name, and the VB program should retrieve the first record >= the string entered. It is *not* a requirement that the retrieved record be LIKE 'whatever%' (I'm trying to make this general-purpose).

Of course, the COMPANY file may be exceptionally huge, so I don't want to just download the entire set of records that matches the above inquiry. [Quoted] [Quoted] Intuitively, I would have liked to be able to say:

[Quoted] [Quoted] [Quoted] select * from COMPANY where COMPANY_NAME >= 'whatever' and ROWNUM = 1 order [Quoted] by COMPANY_NAME;

[Quoted] but it turns out this doesn't work - ROWNUM is assigned before the sort is done.

I'm fairly sure I'm not the first person who's run into this :-) but I'm not [Quoted] conversant enough with SQL yet to know how to do it. I have some vague idea of making it a compound statement using MAX() or MIN() to pull out the exact [Quoted] ID in the inner statement and using that to pull up an exact match in the outer statement, but my head starts to hurt when I try to formulate it.

Any advice or suggestions? Received on Thu Oct 01 1998 - 00:00:00 CEST