Given a table A of people, their native language, and other columns C3 .. C10 represented by ...
PERSON LANGUAGE ... bob english john english vlad russian olga russian jose spanish
How do I construct a query which selects all columns of one row for each distinct language?
PERSON LANGUAGE ... bob english vlad russian jose spanish
It doesn't matter to me which row of each distinct language makes the result. In the result above, I chose the lowest row number of each language.
Eric Petroelje almost has it right:
SELECT * FROM TableA
WHERE ROWID IN ( SELECT MAX(ROWID) FROM TableA GROUP BY Language )
Note: using ROWID (row unique id), not ROWNUM (which gives the row number within the result set)