I work for the Dept of Corrections where race is a classifying factor. I
guess my post should really not be titled SENIORITY, I was just trying to be
politically correct.
Basically my program is as follows:

We have inmates that we train to be firefighters, we have to keep our
training centers racially balanced and therefore only send out certain
quantities of inmates of certain races at a given time to each of our
training locations. However, we like to send them out on a first come first
serve basis therefore I would need to know who has been waiting the longest
by using their arrival date (thats where I came up with the seniority thing).

Some suggeted that I use the MIN/MAX feature but it was returning all my
table entries and just sorting them by date, what i need it to do is return
the earliest mexican, earliest black, earlies, white, and earliest other
inmate on the waiting list.

So the data in my query consists of name, date, race, location, etc.  Its
almost like a staff roster, they are considered employee's

Thanks for all of your assistance.
Carla
aka
cornuts

I would consider a set of TOP N queries, one for each racial
classification.

I still wonder if this is kosher -- I can see why it's considered
fair, but I'm not sure it would stand up to the kind of scrutiny the
Supreme Court has given affirmative action programs. This is a
strict racial quota system for giving out what could be considered
privileges, and quotas have always been completely rejected.

I know that's not the issue here, but it is the kind of thing that
occurs to me when I find myself in these situations.