Question

I know there is a few posts out there already but some are conflicting.

I have taken on a project in which I have inherited a table with a few 1000 entries.

The problem is, there is no auto increment ID field on the table and I have been asked to extract the last 300 rows that were entered into it.

It it possible to extract the last 300 entries from a table? Is there a “systems row id”?

Answer 1

Try this:

SELECT col1, col2, ... 
FROM (SELECT col1,col2, ..., (@auto:=@auto+1) indx 
      FROM tablename, (SELECT @auto:=1) AS a
     ) AS b 
ORDER BY indx DESC 
LIMIT 30