Question

So I have a table with a date column. I want to be able to group these dates by Item field of some type. For example I might have a column called Item and within the Item field there may be 500 entries. Item 12345 might have 5 entires, each with a price. I want to be able to pull out all of the Items, grouped by the newest date.

031126-2M1                          8/10/2011 12:00:00 AM   7.8678
031126-2M1                          7/22/2011 12:00:00 AM   9.5620
031126-2M1                          7/15/2011 12:00:00 AM   8.8090

In this example, I want to show the item with the closest date, 7/15/2011 so I can use that Price of 8.8090. The list would then show the other items, some may have one entry, others might have many, but I want to show all of them with the closets date. Need Help!

Thanks

Answer 1

A MS SQL Server version…

WITH
  sorted_data AS
(
  SELECT
    ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY item_id ORDER BY item_date DESC) AS row_id,
    *
  FROM
    item_data
  WHERE
    item_date <= getDate()
)

SELECT * FROM sorted_data WHERE row_id = 1