Question

I have a licensing scenario where when a person activates a new system it adds the old activations to a lockout table so they can only have their latest X systems activated. I need to pass a parameter of how many recent activations to keep and all older activations should be added to the lockout table if they are not already locked out. I’m not sure how best to do this, i.e. a temp table (which I’ve never done) etc.

For example, an activation comes in from John Doe on System XYZ. I would then need to query the activations table for all activations by John Doe and sort it by DATE DESC. John Doe may have a license allowing two systems in this case so I need all records older than the top 2 deactivated, i.e. inserted into a lockouts table.

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

Answer 1

Something like this perhaps?

insert into lockouts
    (<column list>)
    select <column list>
        from (select <column list>, 
                     row_number() over (order by date desc) as RowNum
                  from activations) t
        where t.RowNum > @NumLicenses