Selecting the alphabetically first customer

I need to select alphabetically the first customer. So, first I have to sort the table customer on customer_name and then select the first among them. I know Rownum does not work.

My Oracle version is 8.0.6. The following query is also not working:

Select customer_id, customer_name, phone from (select customer_id,
customer_name, phone from customer order by customer_name) where rownum <=1.


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The query you are trying to run won't work because that syntax is not supported until 8i. So in 8.0.6 you'll need to do what you need in a function something like the following:

create function get_first_alpha_cust
return number
as
  cursor cust_cursor is
   select customer_id
     from customer
    order by customer_name;

  cust_record customer_cursor%rowtype;

begin
  open cust_cursor;
  for i in 1..1 loop
    fetch cust_cursor into cust_record;
    RETURN (cust_record.customer_id);
  end loop;

  close cust_cursor;
end;
/
This function could then be called to get the customer_id of the first alphabetically sorted customer. Of course, you can tweak the function to return whatever you want... but hopefully this will get you started!

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This was first published in April 2002

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