SQL question

[stecal]

If you know for sure that you will cutting off everything from the first period on, you select the substring of the output. If you know that "blah" will always be X number of characters long, you can approach it that way.

select substr(t.target_name, 1, instr(t.target_name,'.',1,1)-1)
from the rest of your statement....

The instr starts at position 1, finds the first occurrence of a period, which results in a position value (number), then back that off by one, which then gives the length for the substring.