Selecting row with the greatest hexidecimal value

I am looking for a way to select a single row from a My开发者_Python百科SQL table. One of the columns contains a hexidecimal value and I only want to SELECT the row which contains the largest hex value.

So for instance there are three rows like:

id   hex_value   comments
 1   01          some comments...
 2   1A          some comments...
 3   03          some comments...

So the resultant returned rows contents would be id 2 as the value 1A is the greatest.

If anyone could point me in the right direction it would be most appreciated.

Thank you Mark

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select ...
order by CONV(hex_value,16,10)
limit 1

see http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mathematical-functions.html#function_conv

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SELECT ... ORDER BY  UNHEX(hex_value) desc LIMIT 1

should work

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As long as the hexadecimal strings are the same length (as in your example), they are comparable as strings, so you can just sort them:

select id, hex_value, comments
from TheTable
order by hex_value desc
limit 1

Note: You need to use desc when sorting to get the highest value first.