Even though I am no SQL guru, a problem poised by one of my colleagues seemed challenging enough for me to investigate further.

Here was his problem:

He was working on a data migration and he had a table with rows made up of 'Dates' and 'Cost' . There were multiple rows with the same date and he wanted to Pick the first "Cost" value for a specific date.

Now having used SQL reportings ervices, it seemed like an easy task.  It is possible to get this done by using the "First" function. Unfortunately T-SQL does not have a "first" function.

Lets take the following sample table shown below:


He wanted a Query that could give him the Unique Names along with the "First" value for that Name. If we take N2 for example the first value is '3' and for N3 it is '8'.

After some experimenting, the query that produces this result is



Here is the result



Pretty cool huh ?

Hope this helps someone