Returning the DISTINCT first character of a field (MySQL)

Question

I would like to produce a character list of all of the first letters of column in my database. The SQL below illistrats what I would like to return.

SELECT DISTIN         


        

Answer 1

Sorry to do this, but I figured out exactly what I needed to do just now.

SELECT DISTINCT LEFT(name, 1) FROM mydatabase

This returned a list of the first, distinct, single characters that each row in the column started with. I added changed it to the following to get it the list in alpha-numeric order:

SELECT DISTINCT LEFT(name, 1) as letter FROM mydatabase ORDER BY letter

Works like a charm.