Hi There,



My problem is, that I want to display the first date of some record in a

database, the trick lies in, that there is actually two tables where the

information comes from (Not my idea!)



So my simple query goes like this:

SELECT MIN(dateonline) FROM theTable

UNION

SELECT MIN(dateonline) FROM theTable_archive



The problem is now, that I have to record set with one value, now I only

have to figure out, which one of the is the lowest



Perhaps I should mention that it is NOT a date field but a varChar field 

I'm

retrieving the date, which is stored in the format YYYYMMDD



Kind regards

/Thomas

Thomas,



Not knowing the full context of what you are doing with the records,

or what you want to do with them when they are returned,

here is one idea ...



add an order by statement to the end of your query so that you know

the first record you encounter will be the earliest.



Also, I'm not sure your current statement would work correctly unless you 

use the covert(datetime,dateonline) function (otherwise it is returning the 

min varchar value of that field):



SELECT MIN(convert(datetime,dateonline)) FROM theTable

where whereclause

UNION

SELECT MIN(convert(datetime,dateonline) FROM theTable_archive

where whereclause

order by 1 



also i'm assuming there is some whereclause that furthur limits the

scope of the records returned



Hope this helps.



Jim Maddocks