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Asked: 2026-05-16T11:51:11+00:00

I have a table, and there is no column which stores a field of

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  1. I have a table, and there is no column which stores a field of when the record/row was added. How can I get the latest entry into this table? There would be two cases in this:

    • Loop through entire table and get the largest ID, if a numeric ID is being used as the identifier. But this would be very inefficient for a large table.
    • If a random string is being used as the identifier (which is probably very, very bad practise), then this would require more thinking (I personally have no idea other than my first point above).

  2. If I have one field in each row of my table which is numeric, and I want to add it up to get a total (so row 1 has a field which is 3, row 2 has a field which is 7, I want to add all these up and return the total), how would this be done?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    1) If the id is incremental, “select max(id) as latest from mytable”. If a random string was used, there should still be an incremental numeric primary key in addition. Add it. There is no reason not to have one, and databases are optimized to use such a primary key for relations.

    2) “select sum(mynumfield) as total from mytable”

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