Question

Ladies and Gents,

I need to write a query that grabs data from a view, but I’m not sure how to go about this. The issue is there is really no key and there are two fields I’m concerned with that will control what rows I need to retrieve.

The view looks something like this:

Category   columna   columnb   uploaddate 
-----------------------------------------------------
   a        value     value    1/30/2013 04:04:04:000 
   a        value     value    1/29/2013 04:04:04:000 
   b        value     value    1/28/2013 01:23:04:000 
   b        value     value    1/30/2013 04:04:04:000 
   b        value     value    1/30/2013 04:04:04:000 
   c        value     value    1/30/2013 01:01:01:000 
   c        value     value    1/30/2013 01:01:01:000 

What I need to retrieve is all rows for each unique category and the newest uploaddate. So in the example above I would get 1 row for category a which would have the newest uploaddate. Category b would have 2 rows which have the 1/30/2013 date. Category c would have two rows also.

I also need to just compare the date of upload, not the time. As the loading can take a couple seconds. I was trying to use max date but it would only grab the time to the second.

Any guidance/thoughts would be great.

Thanks!

EDIT:

Here is what I threw together so far and I think it’s close but it’s not working yet and I doubt this is the most efficient way to do this.

select 
    * 
from 
    VIEW c 
    INNER JOIN 
    ( 
        SELECT 
            Category, 
            MAX(CONVERT(DateTime, Convert(VarChar, UploadDate, 101))) as maxuploaddate  
        FROM 
            View 
        GROUP BY 
            Category, 
            UploadDate 
    ) temp ON temp.Category = c.Category AND CONVERT(VarChar, UploadDate, 101) = temp.maxuploaddate 

The problem lies in the nested selected statement as it’s still grabbing all combinations of Category and Upload date. Is there a way to do a distinct on the Category and UploadDate, just getting the newest combination?

Thanks Again

Answer 1

Your query is close, you have a mistake in the group by. I’d also get rid of the date conversions; date comparisons work fine.

select 
    * 
from 
    VIEW c 
    INNER JOIN 
    ( 
        SELECT 
            Category, 
            MAX(UploadDate) as maxuploaddate  
        FROM 
            View 
        GROUP BY 
            Category
    ) temp ON temp.Category = c.Category AND UploadDate = temp.maxuploaddate