How to Select the first 5 rows of any table or a view

[lalleima]

HI

I'm some what confuse in this little prob.
I wanted to know if we can select the first 5 rows of any table with a single SQL query? If yes then How?

And mind U, it is not Indexed or a ordered View

Thank U for anyone who have read this and I'm open to any kind of sugestion.

Nishi

 

[JamesLean]

In SQL Server you can use:

SELECT TOP 5 *
FROM tablename
ORDER BY columnname

I seem to remember this isn't strictly ANSI SQL though. --James

 

[r937]

the question has meaning only if you have a column that you can sort on

let's say that column is foo --

[tt]select foo
, bar
from yourtable X
where ( select count(*)
from yourtable
where foo > X.foo ) < 5[/tt]

rudy

http://r937.com/

 

[YipYeppp]

Hi!

You can use ROWNUM :

select *
from your_table
where rownum <= 5;

Best regards,

Yipyeppp..

 

[dnoeth]

This is an ANSI forum, not Oracle ;-)

But there's a ROW_NUMBER OLAP-function in SQL:1999 (and Oracle)

Dieter