SQL confusion

I'm trying to figure out how to do a particular query,
and I'm beating my head against a wall. Here's my
situation:

I'm running postgres 7.3.2 on linux, and making my
requests from Perl scripts using DBD::Pg. My table
structure is as follows (irrelevant cols removed)

CREATE TABLE name (
namecounter integer NOT NULL,
firstmiddle character varying(64) NOT NULL,
lastname character varying(64) NOT NULL,
birthdate date,
hh smallint,
famnu integer,
);

Each row represents a person with a unique
namecounter. Families share a famnu, and usually one
person in a family is marked as head of household
(hh>0), with everyone else hh=0. However, there are a
few families with nobody marked as hh, and I'd like to
elect one by age. The query I'm trying to do is to
pull one person from each household, either the head
of household if available, or the eldest if not. I
want them sorted by last name, so I'd prefer to find
them all in one query, no matter how ugly and nested
it has to be.

I can pull the list with hh>0 easily enough, but I'm
not sure how to pull out the others.

I realize that this could be done through some looping
in the Perl script, but I'd like to avoid pulling the
whole list into memory in case the list gets long. My
preference is to just handle one record at a time in
Perl if possible.

Help?

Andrew Ward
adward55(at)yahoo(dot)com

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