SELECT MAX(field) FROM table

to find the highest number in a table, i would use:
SELECT MAX(field) FROM table

how would i go about finding the ten highest numbers?

correct.

Following may work, please try it:


select distinct FIELD1 from TABLE1 order by FIELD1 desc limit 10



Variation of "LIMIT" across diffrerent SQL engine
===============================

MySQL uses LIMIT
ORACLE uses ROWNUM
Microsoft SQL uses TOP

MSSQL Example:
===============

To return the top 10 highest paid employees:

SELECT TOP 10 empid, empname, salary
FROM employees
ORDER BY salary DESC

ORACLE Example:
==============

select rownum, col1 from table1 where rownum between 1 and 10

Unfortunately, there is no standard for LIMIT/TOP keywords. It varies from each RDBMS. The best way to find out which is correct for your platform is to simply read the documentation.

I am making a news script where it can only show 1 news item at a time and the latest one needs to always to be seen
I am using id with auto increment and therefore the newsest post will be the highest id number i wonder if u could help me by showing me how to automatically show the latest news item
this is what i have so far

<?
include("dbinfo.inc.php");
mysql_connect(localhost,$username,$password);
@mysql_select_db($database) or die( "Unable to select database");
$query="SELECT * FROM webnews WHERE id='$id'";
$result=mysql_query($query);

$num=mysql_numrows($result);

mysql_close();



?>
<?
$i=0;
while ($i < $num) {
$id=mysql_result($result,$i,"id");
$by=mysql_result($result,$i,"by");
$snews=mysql_result($result,$i,"snews");
$fnews=mysql_result($result,$i,"fnews");
$date=mysql_result($result,$i,"date");

?>
<p><? echo "$id"; ?></p>
<p><? echo "$by"; ?></p>
<p><? echo "$snews"; ?></p>
<p><? echo "$fnews"; ?></p>
<p><? echo "$date"; ?></p>
<?
++$i;
}


?>
--------------------------------------------
I may be going to wrong way about it, so any help would be greatly appreciated


thank you

try using the SQL: