Question

I have a simple table called ‘message’ consisting of an ‘id’ column and a ‘date’ column. There can be multiple id’s with the same value. I’m looking for a query that returns up to three of each id, and of those three they must be the ones with the greatest dates.

So the query would produce something like this:

id | date
--- -------------------
36  2011-04-01 08:41:19
36  2011-04-17 08:05:18
36  2011-04-17 18:48:49
39  2011-03-31 05:45:15
39  2011-03-31 05:50:07
39  2011-03-31 05:56:23
41  2011-04-11 07:02:27
41  2011-04-19 02:31:31
41  2011-04-19 02:32:53
etc...

I’ve been having trouble figuring this out.

Answer 1

select * from table as t1
where (select count(*) from table as t2
       where t1.id = t2.id and t2.date > t1.date) < 3
order by id, date desc