You could use ForgotPasswordAgain's initial "won't work" idea as a subquery to grab the full record for the shortest distances. 

select a.* from table_name a 
  join (
    select min(distance) as min_dist, 
           service_id as min_id
           from table_name
           group by service_id
    ) b 
  on (a.distance = min_dist and a.service_id = min_id);

[download]
If (service_id, distance) is not a unique key, this will return all the stop_references with the minimal distance. This may be a Good Thing, depending on the application. If you want only one result, adding the appropriate ORDER BY and LIMIT 1 clauses should do the trick. 
/is not a guru
//tried it and it worked for me

[download]

In reply to Re: Help with manipulating data from a database?? by mikeB
in thread Help with manipulating data from a database?? by Harch84

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.