Do you mean you want John instead of Micheal because it appears "before" Micheal? If so, you are not in luck. Relational databases act on sets of data. There is no row order in a set - no row is before or after another. Think of a table containing rows like a bag full of balls.

Unless you can specify an order to the data then it is not possible to get the "top" row because there is no top row. If you could change this, say, to the alphabetically greatest name then it can be done.