How do I do top 1 in Oracle?

Question

How do I do the following?

select top 1 Fname from MyTbl

In Oracle 11g?

Answer 1

With Oracle 12c (June 2013), you are able to use it like the following.

SELECT * FROM   MYTABLE
--ORDER BY COLUMNNAME -OPTIONAL          
OFFSET 0 ROWS FETCH NEXT 1 ROWS ONLY

Answer 2

Use:

SELECT x.*
  FROM (SELECT fname 
          FROM MyTbl) x
 WHERE ROWNUM = 1

If using Oracle9i+, you could look at using analytic functions like ROW_NUMBER() but they won't perform as well as ROWNUM.

Answer 3

select * from (
    select FName from MyTbl
)
where rownum <= 1;

Answer 4

If you want just a first selected row, you can:

select fname from MyTbl where rownum = 1

You can also use analytic functions to order and take the top x:

select max(fname) over (rank() order by some_factor) from MyTbl

Answer 5

SELECT *
  FROM (SELECT * FROM MyTbl ORDER BY Fname )
 WHERE ROWNUM = 1;

Answer 6

You can do something like

    SELECT *
      FROM (SELECT Fname FROM MyTbl ORDER BY Fname )
 WHERE rownum = 1;

You could also use the analytic functions RANK and/or DENSE_RANK, but ROWNUM is probably the easiest.