Question

I have a table that contains 300 million rows, and a clustered index on the [DataDate] column.

How do I select the last 10 rows of this table (I want to find the most recent date in the table)?

Database: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2.

Update

The answers below work perfectly – but only if there is a clustered index on [DataDate]. The table is, after all, 300 million rows, and a naive query would end up taking hours to execute rather than seconds. The query plan is using the clustered index on [DataDate] to get results within a few tens of milliseconds.

Answer 1

TOP

SELECT TOP(10) [DataDate] FROM YourTable ORDER BY [DataDate] DESC