>>>I am using ORACLE 7.3 .
>>>
>>>I have one table "employee" with a column "sal" .
>>>I have inserted the data into the sal in random order.
>>>Now I want to retrive the rows from that table who draw the maximum salary. (sal).
>>>
>>>That is first 5 records after the list is selected by using "order by desc " clause.
>>>
>>>I want to use single SQL statement.
>>>
>>>some thing like this algorithm.
>>>
>>>select first 5 records from ("select sal from employee order by sal desc " )
>>>
>>>I tried to use rownum, count() etc. but in fail.
>>>
>>>I dont want to use Foxpro .
>>>
>>>
>>>--Satya
>>
>>If you would want to use Foxpro then SELECT TOP 5 .... will do this job. If you don't want to use Foxpro, then what is a purpose to post this question on Foxpro forum?
>
>
>I am using ODBC support to connect oracle with VFP. And don't want to use one more query to get top 5 records that have been fetched by the SQLexec command.

There is no *Select top* for an Oracle query. You would have to do:

sqlexec(nHandle,"select sal from employee order by sal desc","MyCursor")
select top 5 from mycursor