Recordset

a | 8
a | 9
b | 8
c | 8
d | 8
d | 9

I want to sort and bring back this:

a | 9
b | 8
c | 8
d | 9

In other words, filter out the 8s if they already have 9s.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

collect all the a's, see if it has nine, if it does see if it has eight, if it does remove 8.
repeate for each letter...

use recursion...
what language are you doing this in?

doing it in php

Is the resultset coming from a database or how is the recordset populated?
In SQL there's select DISTINCT(fieldname) that filters out the query.

On the other hand, php solution would be array_unique().
You can look up function specifics at www.php.net/array_unique

what about "Select max(columnA) from table, order by columnA ASC"?

Originally posted by SpiralWebs
use recursion...
what language are you doing this in?

Yea, use a function that calls itself basically in a loop until it finds it. If it goes through all the codes and gives none then return the 8.

Hope that make sense.

Originally posted by carguy84
what about "Select max(columnA) from table, order by columnA ASC"?

That would return only 1 record which makes your example useless in this case. That's why you have DISTINCT keyword.

Also, using array_unique when dealing with arrays makes recursion unnecessary and pointless when dealing with such problems.

oops, that's what you get for giving drunken advice, lol. forgot the "group by columnA" part :)

Look I think whatever you get the data from, simply using PHP's built-in array_flip this way:
$array=array_flip(array_flip($array));
will result in a new array with no duplicates.
HTH
Omar