Select the first row by group
From a dataframe like this test <- data.frame('id'= rep(1:5,2), 'string'= LETTERS[1:10]) test <- test[order(test$id), ] rownames(test) <- 1:10 > test id string 1 1 A 2 1 F 3 2 B 4 2 G 5 3 C 6 3 H 7 4 D 8 4 I 9 5 E 10 5 J I want to create a new one with the first row of each id / string pair. If sqldf accepted R code within it, the query could look like this: res <- sqldf("select id, min(rownames(test)), string from test group by id, string") > res id string 1 1 A 3 2 B 5 3 C 7 4 D 9 5 E Is there a solution short of creating a new column like test$row <- rownames(test) and running the same