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Dear list,

I hope this to be a simple question. I have need to simply read the first 
row in a given table. Right now,  I have some legacy code that selects all 
rows in a table just to see if the first row has a certain value.

The code is seeking to see if an update has been run or not. A hypothetical 
scenario would be: has an update been run to populate data into a new 
column in a table. Neither the data nor any of the rows are consistently 
known. So the test selects all rows, tests the first row and then ends if 
the column has a value.

Does anyone have a better way to do this?

Regards