How to return only the earliest date for each user (users have 100s of dates)

Question

I've read for hours but am getting nowhere, so was wondering if I could get a little help. Here is my problem, which should be simple for experts (trouble is I am a total noob)

I would like to only get each unique user and their earliest time recorded, just like this:

Any thoughts? The simpler the query, the better. Thanks!

Answer 1

You could use a simple GROUP BY with MIN:

SELECT Username, MIN(Datecolumn) As Datecolumn
FROM dbo.TableName
GROUP BY Username