title: is there any function in sql which may return the result from first two alphabet or the first alphabet?
body: <p>I am working on oracle10g. I was curious to know that is there any SQL function which may give results from the starting alphabet of a string. </p>
  
  <p>For example, if I have road-1, road-A, road-89 and I want to know total number of such road sets without using the sql <code>count()</code> function.</p>