alphabetical vs. chronological order

Question

alphabetical vs. chronological order

chburns

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Points: 15
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June 15, 2009 at 8:28 am

#155830

I am having a problem returning records in sql. I am trying to retrieve the first record in a table (chronologically), but when I use a min function it is giving me the first record alphabetically instead. Does anyone know how to change this? Thanks for the help.

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Gail Shaw SSC Guru Points: 1004514 More actions · Answer 1

Please post the query, table definitions, sample data and desired output. Read this to see the best way to post this to get quick responses.

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Best+Practices/61537/

Which column in the table has the date inserted? For getting the earliest row back you're going to need that. An identity column would also suffice.

Gail Shaw
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SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability

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Lowell SSC Guru Points: 323547 More actions · Answer 2

chburns (6/15/2009)
I am having a problem returning records in sql. I am trying to retrieve the first record in a table (chronologically), but when I use a min function it is giving me the first record alphabetically instead. Does anyone know how to change this? Thanks for the help.

there is no guarantee SQL will order the data in any way without an Explicit ORDER BY clause.

the order of data returned will not follow any rules unless you explicitly use an ORDER BY [somecolumn] statement.

without it, SQL returns the data in the last way it touched it due to the executino plan...so a simple SELECT * F$ROM comes out one way, but if you apply anything like a function,min, etc, it comes out the way it was convenient for the execution plan to order it to get the data efficiently.

Lowell

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Steve Jones - SSC Editor SSC Guru Points: 738773 More actions · Answer 3

You do need some type of date. An identity could work, but since these are not guaranteed to be unique, and they can get re-seeded, I'd be careful about using those.