Question

I have a table similar to the example shown below.

AccountNo  DateOfOrder    OrderID   
-----------------------------------------   
 123       March 1 2010   1   
 222       March 3 2010   2   
 123       April 1 2010   3   
 345       March 15 2010  77   
 123       june 1 2010    55   
 123       march 5 2010   33   
 345       march 1 2010   99   
 222       june 1 2010    7   
 222       june 2 2010    22   

I need a query that outputs three columns:

AccountNo, MostRecentDateOfOrder, SecondMostRecentDateOfOrder

Answer 1

You did not specify which version of SQL Server but you can use CTE and a PIVOT for this in SQL Server 2005+:

;with cte as
(
  select accountno, dateoforder, orderid,
    row_number() over(partition by accountno 
                      order by dateoforder desc) rn
  from yourtable
)
select accountno,
  [1] MostRecentOrder,
  [2] SecondMostRecent
from 
(
  select accountno, dateoforder, rn
  from cte
) x
pivot 
(
  max(dateoforder)
  for rn in ([1], [2])
) p

See SQL Fiddle with Demo