Stefan Schwarzer wrote:
Sorry,
I forgot to mention my table design, which is like this:
name 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Afghanistan ....
Albania ....
(Yep, I know, bad table design.... :-)). I tried to change it to the
more common "id | year | value" format, but there were too many SQL
problems afterwards for the different queries/calculations we need to
have....)
May I suggest that you concentrate on solving *those* problems instead of
the programmatically trivial computation of lowest common value? Notice
that a *really trivial* programming exercise becomes highly involved in
your case --- if I'm understanding correctly what you have, I assume you'd
have to check one by one the fields for NULL or non-NULL values --- that's
intolerably ugly, IMHO, and it is a very simple and direct consequence of
an as-unsound-as-it-gets db/table design.
Carlos
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