Hi,
Is there anyway to INSERT a record into the first row of a table ?

nope

that's because there is no such thing as the first row of a table -- all the rows are equal

what is it that you are really trying to do, and why? can you give examples?

Hello and thanks for the response.

I am trying to send a temp table into an outfile, after inserting a header record.
The insert is plain and easy but I just want it to be at the top and not somewhere in the 33rd thousandth row.
Any ideas pls?
thanks

use ORDER BY

Already tried that,
ORDER BY MATERIAL_NBR....
But MATERIAL_NBR may have alpha numeric characters.

A00198,
material_nbr,
P0021,
ZZZ900... AND SO ON.

ORDER BY special_condition_for_header

Just tried that didnt work,mysql doesnt seem to recognise 'special_condition_for header'.

Anyways i found a way out.

To add a header to the outfile the best way to do this and ensuring that its at the top is to use a UNION statement.

e.g.

SELECT 'MATERIAL_NBR', 'MATERIAL_TYPE'
UNION
SELECT MATERIAL_NBR, MATERIAL_TYPE INTO OUTFILE 'C:\TEST\TEST.TXT'
FIELDS TERMINATED BY '|'
LINES TERMINATED BY '\n\r' FROM TABLE MATERIALS;

Works like a charm.
Thanks for your help..

of course not, that was for you -- you were supposed to write a special condition that recognizes the header row

i hate to break it to you, but without an ORDER BY clause, that UNION query is not guaranteed to give you the header first -- it will give you the header row first only until the one time it doesn't

Aha I found a solution for that too my friend.
After the union statement if the SELECT MATERIAL_NBR etc is enclosed in parantheses ORDER BY doesnt alter the header row!!

e.g.

SELECT 'MATERIAL_NBR', 'MATERIAL_TYPE'
UNION
(SELECT MATERIAL_NBR, MATERIAL_TYPE INTO OUTFILE 'C:\TEST\TEST.TXT'
FIELDS TERMINATED BY '|'
LINES TERMINATED BY '\n\r' FROM TABLE MATERIALS ORDER BY MATERIAL_NBR);

Will yield the same result!!