How can we retrieve the first record from an Oracle query result?

1 year ago

Ava Mitchell

1 minute

In Oracle, you can use the ROWNUM method to retrieve the first record of a query result.

SELECT *
FROM table_name
WHERE ROWNUM = 1;

This will return the first record in the table_name table.

SELECT *
FROM (
    SELECT *
    FROM table_name
    ORDER BY column_name
) 
WHERE ROWNUM = 1;

In this example, a subquery is first used to sort the table, and then in the outer query, ROWNUM = 1 is used to retrieve the first record of the sorted result set.3. Using the FETCH FIRST method (applicable to Oracle 12c and above versions):

SELECT *

FROM table_name

ORDER BY column_name

FETCH FIRST 1 ROWS ONLY;

This method uses FETCH FIRST in the query results to specify the number of records to return, using either the FIRST or NEXT keyword along with the number of rows to return. Either way, it can achieve retrieving the first record of the query results.