Ok....let me go into a little more detail....
These are columns of my table
ContractNumber | CCode| DCode| LocationCode
12345 36343 38904 93283
12345 36343 38904 83943
12345 36343 38904 02932
25334 89209 17323 92022
25334 89209 17323 93742
83930 83849 88343 90283
83930 83849 88343 02833
...

I know this terrible, but this what the data looks in the table and what I have to work with. I need to select all the contract numbers from this table( about 100000 rows), but I only want the first occurence. Rownum will not work because I need all the contract numbers and if I use rownum it will return only one record. I have tried DISTINCT but it still returns all occurences of the contract number. This would probably be better handled through PL/SQL, but I wanted to make sure I could not do it through SQL first.

Thanks for your help.