a select to retreive the 10 max values from a table

[TheSeeker]

i am rather a newbie...but i was wonder what select statement i can use to retreieve the 10 top values from a table...for instance the 10 books that sell the most....

Select title, author, price, noofsales where noofsales between ????

if use between i need 2 values the MAX(noofsales) that would give me one value for the between..how do i find the 10 value?

or is there another select one could use?

[eoghain]

Depending on the database that you are using you may have access to a statement called LIMIT that would allow you to minimize the number of rows returned. But to just get the records in the proper order you can use this.

SELECT title, author, price, noofsales  

  FROM table
 ORDER BY noofsales DESC

Check your database documentation to see if you can use LIMIT and it's proper syntax, but just using this query you can then just walk through 10 records and you'd have the top 10.