I was always told that, when selecting a single record, I should use UP TO 1 ROWS whenever the key was not fully provided. My elementary school teacher told me that I should always aks why: why? Nobody ever told me why.

Some days ago I went looking for answers and found this post by Horst Keller. According to Horst, SELECT SINGLE doesn’t allow for ORDER BY which is important since, without a full key, the resulting record is undetermined. So, ORDER BY is “highly recommende`”.

Ok. It makes sense and I’ve always done that.

But what about when you know that the order is totally indifferent? We should probably still use UP TO 1 ROWS instead of SELECT SINGLE so that someone else doesn’t come along and badmouth us.

Greetings from Abapinho