Question

I use a MySQL database to manage donations for an organisation. Donators can make more than one donations. Thus I have two tables: donators contains information about the donators and donations contains information about time and amount of the donations. Both tables are connected via a donatorID.

I want to read out information about each distinct donator. The list should be ordered by the date of the last donation. I came up with the code below, but that uses the date of the first donation instead of the last donation.

How can I use the newest donation-date for each donator?

SELECT
    DISTINCT(`donators`.`name`),
    `donators`.`city`,
    `donators`.`country`,
    `donators`.`website`
FROM
    `donators`
INNER JOIN
    `donations`
ON
    `donators`.`donatorID` = `donations`.`donatorID`
ORDER BY `donations`.`date` DESC

Answer 1

SELECT  a.*, b.max_DATE
FROM    Donators a
        INNER JOIN
        (
            SELECT  DonatorID, MAX(date) max_DATE
            FROM    Donations
            GROUP   BY DonatorID
        ) b ON a.DonatorID = b.DonatorID
ORDER   BY  b.max_DATE DESC 

if you want to have the records of donation table displayed based on the latest donation date,

SELECT  a.*, c.*
FROM    Donators a
        INNER JOIN Donations c
            ON a.DonatorID = c.DonatorID
        INNER JOIN
        (
            SELECT  DonatorID, MAX(date) max_DATE
            FROM    Donations
            GROUP   BY DonatorID
        ) b ON  c.DonatorID = b.DonatorID AND
                c.date = b.max_DATE
ORDER   BY c.date DESC