Advanced Software Engineering

SQL: selecting the first login of a user

A friend of mine asked how he could select the first appearance of a user in a table having the timestamp when the row was inserted. A data sample follows: date, user 2010/12/10 11:32, john 2010/12/10 12:32, john 2010/12/11 12:20, mary 2010/12/12 12:20, mary 2010/11/11 10:20, peter And the he wanted to get: 2010/12/10 11:32, [...]