My apologies..

In my haste to get the question out I forgot an important piece, thanks to Ninja's_RGR'us for reminding me.

The query is part of an IVR system, there are 8-channels...

I imagine there is a better way but, this seems to work.

select distinct a.seq, a.area from play a inner join play b on a.seq = b.seq and a.area in

(select top...