Question

I have a table with User data such as name, address etc and another table which has a paragraph of text about the user. The reason that they are separate is because we need to record all the old about data. So if the user changes their paragraph – the old one should still be stored. Each bit of about data has a primary key aboutMeID. What I want to do is have a join that pulls their name, address etc and the latest bit of aboutMe data from the other table.

I am not sure though how I can order the join to only get the latest about me data.

Can someone help?

Answer 1

Where you have two tables to join, the subquery asks the table with the older paragraphs to give just the last one, ordered by date (datestamp DESC) and match it up based on your user ID. Finally the outer query limits the whole thing to just the user in question (@UserID).

SELECT name, address, aboutme
FROM users
LEFT JOIN
    (SELECT aboutme FROM oldertable
    WHERE aboutMeID = users.id
    ORDER BY datestamp DESC
    LIMIT 1)
WHERE users.id = @UserID;