Question

I have a really big query in which makes some troubles for me because one join can return several rows. I only want the latest row (identified by a date field) in this result set, but I cant seem to put together the correct query to make it work.

The query I need MAX date from is:

SELECT custid,reason,date FROM OPT opt WHERE opt.custid = 167043;

Teh custid is really found through a join, but for simplicity I’ve added it to the where clause here. This query produces the following result:

custid    grunn       date
167043  "Test 1"    19.10.2005 12:33:18
167043  "Test 2"    28.11.2005 16:23:35
167043  "Test 3"    14.06.2010 15:43:16

How can I retrieve only one record from this resultset? And that record is the one with the highest date? Ultimately Im putting this into a big query which does alot of joins, so hopefully I can use this example into my bigger query.

Answer 1

You can do this:

SELECT * FROM
( SELECT custid,reason,date FROM OPT opt WHERE opt.custid = 167043
  ORDER BY date DESC
) 
WHERE ROWNUM = 1;