Find the earliest date in a range of dates?

[HairyArse]

Hi guys, I'm trying to create a report in PHP/HTML showing all deliveries made from our database. I'd like to automatically generate a different report for each month of the year.

So I need to do two things: First I need to be able to find the earliest occurence of the date in the field called date_delivered in my SQL database - is there a particular function I should be using to achieve this?

And then secondly I need to automatically create a link to each month which will take the user to a page showing all deliveries that month?

Any suggestions?

[Installer]

If, for instance, you have your monthly report pages named like "2006may.php", you could do something like this:

$query = "SELECT date_delivered, DATE_FORMAT(date_delivered, '%Y%b') AS month_delivered " .
         "FROM my_table ORDER BY date_delivered ASC";
$result = mysql_query($query);
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
    echo 'Date Delivered = ' . $row['date_delivered'] .
         ' <a href="path/to/month/page/' . $row['month_delivered'] . '.php">Month Link</a>';
    }
}

Keep in mind that this is just a bare-bones example.