Document information

Document ID:	769
Subject:	Retrieving the Top-N or Bottom-N Rows from a SQL Table
Creation date:	7/29/09 2:59 PM
Last modified on:	7/29/09 3:09 PM

Details

Following example show how to retrieve top-N or bottom-N rows from an Oracle table. This example makes use of a pseudo-column in Oracle called ROWNUM and we want to retrieve top 5 rows.

select *
from (select * from CUSTOMER order by ID)
WHERE ROWNUM <= 5

Note: that this example makes use of a feature called an "inline view" that is supported by Oracle but may not be supported in other RDBMS.

User comments

Posted by Meg on 10/25/10 5:12 PM

Getting Error" Error: ERROR: Attribute 'ROWNUM' not found (State:42S22, Native Code: 1F)

Posted by Yvone on 3/24/10 10:24 AM

select * from T_REF_LIST where rownum <=5 I got error message Error: ERROR: Attribute 'ROWNUM' not found (State:42S22, Native Code: 1F)

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