Question

I have a table with data like this:

+-----------+-------+------+----------+
| timestamp | event | data | moreData |
+-----------+-------+------+----------+
| 100000000 |     1 |   10 |       20 |
| 100000001 |     1 |   15 |       10 |
| 100000002 |     1 |   30 |       30 |
| 100000003 |     1 |    5 |       50 |
| 100000004 |     2 |  110 |      120 |
| 100000005 |     2 |  115 |      110 |
| 100000006 |     2 |  130 |      130 |
| 100000007 |     2 |   15 |      150 |
+-----------+-------+------+----------+

Now I want to select only the newest rows for each event. So in the end I want to have this result set:

+-----------+-------+------+----------+
| timestamp | event | data | moreData |
+-----------+-------+------+----------+
| 100000003 |     1 |    5 |       50 |
| 100000007 |     2 |   15 |      150 |
+-----------+-------+------+----------+

So far I was not able to do this. In MySQL I can use “GROUP BY event” but then I get some random row from the database, not the newest. ORDER BY doesn’t help because the grouping is done before ordering. Using an aggregation like MAX(timestamp) while grouping by event also doesn’t help because then the timestamp is the newest but “data” and “moreData” is still from some other random row.

I guess I have to do a sub select so I have to first get the latest timestamp like this:

SELECT MAX(timestamp), event FROM mytable GROUP BY event

and then use the result set to filter a second SELECT, but how? And maybe there is a clever way to do it without a sub select?

Answer 1

AFAIK, sub select is your best option, as follows:

SELECT * 
FROM mytable mt 
    JOIN ( SELECT MAX(timestamp) as max, event 
           FROM mytable 
           GROUP BY event) m_mt 
    ON (mt.timestamp = m_mt.max AND mt.event = m_mt.event);