Need some help with this idea!

hey- I want to select the oldest show from a database to display on my main page, since the oldest show is also the show happening closest to any current time(if that makes sense...). I included a timestamp field in my table of shows in anticipation of checking that to find out what was the oldest. however, I'm wondering how I should go about doing that exactly. my idea was the scan through just that column of timestamps, find the lowest one, and then make a selection from the db based on the timestamp. Can any give me some examples of code to scan through a column like i mentioned, or give me better ideas on how to do this?? thanks chris