Path: news.easynews.com!easynews!sjcppf01.usenetserver.com!usenetserver.com!cyclone.bc.net!newsfeed.stanford.edu!postnews1.google.com!not-for-mail From: rshea@my-deja.com (Richard Shea) Newsgroups: comp.databases.oracle.misc Subject: Re: "GROUP BY" - FAQ I've no doubt but I can't find the answer Date: 9 Oct 2001 22:34:23 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com/ Lines: 38 Message-ID: <43160f6f.0110092134.9df6ad3@posting.google.com> References: <43160f6f.0110082246.63e4d0e4@posting.google.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 203.96.152.181 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1002692063 31038 127.0.0.1 (10 Oct 2001 05:34:23 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 10 Oct 2001 05:34:23 GMT Xref: easynews comp.databases.oracle.misc:70101 X-Received-Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2001 02:37:33 MST (news.easynews.com) Well I have already (approx 2001-10-10 01.00 UTC) posted a follow up to this thread which doesn't seem to have appeared yet in the NG. I'll assume it will appear and go on from there. Basically I had some difficultities with the approaches suggested and I started looking for alternate methods. I seem to have found one by writing a function like this ... CREATE FUNCTION (PAR_ID_IN IN TAS_PARTICIPANT.PAR_AUTOID%TYPE) RETURN NUMBER IS CURSOR PEV_CUR IS SELECT PEV_PET_EVENT_TYPE,PEV_EVENT_DATETIME FROM TAS_PARTICIPANT_EVENT WHERE PEV_PAR_ID = PAR_ID_IN ORDER BY PEV_EVENT_DATETIME DESC; latest_Event_Type TAS_PARTICIPANT_EVENT.PEV_PET_EVENT_TYPE%TYPE; latest_Event_DateTime TAS_PARTICIPANT_EVENT.PEV_EVENT_DATETIME%TYPE; BEGIN OPEN PEV_CUR; FETCH PEV_CUR INTO latest_Event_Type,latest_Event_DateTime; CLOSE PEV_CUR; RETURN latest_Event_Type; END; ... I'd still be interested in finding a less clunky way of doing it but this at least seems to provide me what I need in the short term. Thanks for all help and I'd still be interested to hear suggestions to the original post. regards richard shea. rshea@my-deja.com