I'm an Oracle guy, and if the DB is Oracle Maclir's suggestion is best by far.

UPDATE: on second thought, if you DB supports DISTINCT and ROWNUM you could do something like this:

select distinct fname from jonathan.sc_name where fname like '%D%' and
+ rownum = 1;
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fname is a column i know will only have so many values with D in them, use a col like this in your own records. I get all of those, dictinctly to avoid duplicates, and then add that I only want one of the rows that result from this. if you use a number column and a rand number, you should be good to go.