multiple extract() with WHERE clause possible? - date

Question

So far I have come up with the below:
WHERE (extract(month FROM orders)) =
(SELECT min(extract(month from orderdate))
FROM orders)
However, that will consequently return zero to many rows, and in my case, many, because many orders exist within that same earliest (minimum) month, i.e. 4th February, 9th February, 15th Feb, ...
I know that a WHERE clause can contain multiple columns, so why wouldn't the below work?
WHERE (extract(day FROM orderdate)), (extract(month FROM orderdate)) =
(SELECT min(extract(day from orderdate)), min(extract(month FROM orderdate))
FROM orders)
I simply get: SQL Error: ORA-00920: invalid relational operator
Any help would be great, thank you!
Sample data:
02-Feb-2012
14-Feb-2012
22-Dec-2012
09-Feb-2013
18-Jul-2013
01-Jan-2014
Output:
02-Feb-2012
14-Feb-2012
Desired output:
02-Feb-2012

Answer 1

I recreated your table and found out you just messed up the brackets a bit. The following works for me:
where
(extract(day from OrderDate),extract(month from OrderDate))
=
(select
min(extract(day from OrderDate)),
min(extract(month from OrderDate))
from orders
)

Answer 2

Use something like this:
with cte1 as (
select
extract(month from OrderDate) date_month,
extract(day from OrderDate) date_day,
OrderNo
from tablename
), cte2 as (
select min(date_month) min_date_month, min(date_day) min_date_day
from cte1
)
select cte1.*
from cte1
where (date_month, date_day) = (select min_date_month, min_date_day from cte2)
A common table expression enables you to restructure your data and then use this data to do your select. The first cte-block (cte1) selects the month and the day for each of your table rows. Cte2 then selects min(month) and min(date). The last select then combines both ctes to select all rows from cte1 that have the desired month and day.
There is probably a shorter solution to that, however I like common table expressions as they are almost all the time better to understand than the "optimal, shortest" query.

Answer 3

If that is really what you want, as bizarre as it seems, then as a different approach you could forget the extracts and the subquery against the table to get the minimums, and use an analytic approach instead:
select orderdate
from (
select o.*,
row_number() over (order by to_char(orderdate, 'MMDD')) as rn
from orders o
)
where rn = 1;
ORDERDATE
---------
01-JAN-14
The row_number() effectively adds a pseudo-column to every row in your original table, based on the month and day in the order date. The rn values are unique, so there will be one row marked as 1, which will be from the earliest day in the earliest month. If you have multiple orders with the same day/month, say 01-Jan-2013 and 01-Jan-2014, then you'll still only get exactly one with rn = 1, but which is picked is indeterminate. You'd need to add further order by conditions to make it deterministic, but I have no idea what you might want.
That is done in the inner query; the outer query then filters so that only the records marked with rn = 1 is returned; so you get exactly one row back from the overall query.
This also avoids the situation where the earliest day number is not in the earliest month number - say if you only had 01-Jan-2014 and 02-Feb-2014; comparing the day and month separately would look for 01-Feb-2014, which doesn't exist.
SQL Fiddle (with Thomas Tschernich's anwer thrown in too, giving the same result for this data).
To join the result against your invoice table, you don't need to join to the orders table again - especially not with a cross join, which is skewing your results. You can do the join (at least) two ways:
SELECT
o.orderno,
to_char(o.orderdate, 'DD-MM-YYYY'),
i.invno
FROM
(
SELECT o.*,
row_number() over (order by to_char(orderdate, 'MMDD')) as rn
FROM orders o
) o, invoices i
WHERE i.invno = o.invno
AND rn = 1;
Or:
SELECT
o.orderno,
to_char(o.orderdate, 'DD-MM-YYYY'),
i.invno
FROM
(
SELECT orderno, orderdate, invno
FROM
(
SELECT o.*,
row_number() over (order by to_char(orderdate, 'MMDD')) as rn
FROM orders o
)
WHERE rn = 1
) o, invoices i
WHERE i.invno = o.invno;
The first looks like it does more work but the execution plans are the same.
SQL Fiddle with your pastebin-supplied query that gets two rows back, and these two that get one.