Question

Simply put, I have a table with, among other things, a column for timestamps. I want to get the row with the most recent (i.e. greatest value) timestamp. Currently I’m doing this:

SELECT * FROM table ORDER BY timestamp DESC LIMIT 1 

But I’d much rather do something like this:

SELECT * FROM table WHERE timestamp=max(timestamp) 

However, SQLite rejects this query:

SQL error: misuse of aggregate function max() 

The documentation confirms this behavior (bottom of page):

Aggregate functions may only be used in a SELECT statement.

My question is: is it possible to write a query to get the row with the greatest timestamp without ordering the select and limiting the number of returned rows to 1? This seems like it should be possible, but I guess my SQL-fu isn’t up to snuff.

Answer 1

SELECT * from foo where timestamp = (select max(timestamp) from foo) 

or, if SQLite insists on treating subselects as sets,

SELECT * from foo where timestamp in (select max(timestamp) from foo)