I discovered the “rownum” trick early in my usage of Oracle databases — especially useful for sampling data to see what’s in there, something like “select * from dataTable where rownum < 6” gets you the first five records. But that’s not suitable if you want to sort the records. In this particular case, I have a series of names. I want to find the highest number value in the series so I can name my object with the next sequential name.

Enter “fetch first”  … this appears to be available since 12c (so older database installations may still require a more convoluted solution):

SELECT set_name from set_data
WHERE set_name LIKE 'Something-With-A-Series-%'
ORDER BY set_name DESC
fetch first 1 row only;

Which returns the last name in the series.