![select into is used to retrieve one record from a file](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisuIXN-tSxhiA8PDIbVd9Uz4H-CLs4rePo-U-McWOcMMD-mAdXHYzhk4EKZl8OR0ByCY_2TCTXiUuCJrg9bZcYgf7pksXa3l0HpoUIFioUmwvmG2jnd_HmEvxnZ7Kf2m74QbI7lRFkGhlh/s200/sql.png)
The germ for this post came from a question I was asked by a reader of this blog:
In SQLRPG do I have to define cursor, open cursor, fetch, close cursor if I only want one record?
That is a lot of work just to retrieve one record. Fortunately there is a very simple method where I can retrieve a field, multiple fields, the entire record, or join to another record, etc providing I am just returning one record/row.