Question

Each time my user looks up a customer, I store the customer ID, Name and timestamp (timestamp = when the user performed the look up).

Kinda like:

ID  Name      Timestamp
1   CompanyA  2012-10-01 10:00
2   ComapnyB  2012-10-01 10:11
3   CompanyA  2012-10-01 10:22
4   CompanyA  2012-10-01 10:25
4   CompanyC  2012-10-01 10:32

My question is …

I want to return TOP 30 distinct customers sorted by date descending – how do I do that?

I want to return this:

CompanyC
CompanyA
CompanyB

… only a single instance sorted by the date descending.

Answer 1

SELECT TOP 30 Name
FROM Customer
GROUP BY Name
ORDER BY MAX(Timestamp) DESC