Question

I have the following table

 custid    ordid   qty      datesold 1         A2       12      2008-01-05 2         A5       5       2008-01-02 1         A1       5       2008-01-01 2         A7       3       2007-02-05 

What’t the best way of getting the previous order for every customer?

Thanks

Answer 1

If by ‘previous’ you mean ‘the one before the latest’:

SELECT TOP 1   ordid FROM   orders WHERE   custid = @custid   and datesold < (SELECT MAX(datesold) FROM orders i where i.custid = orders.custid) ORDER BY   datesold DESC 

Of course datesold has to be a DATETIME with distinct enough values for this to work. A date alone will not be enough. If you have a record created date for example, this would be a good substitution for datesold.