Question

Suppose I have a timestamp as a parameter I call it “C”.
And in the database I have a table “TABLE” which contains 2 fields. Timestamp “A”, Timestamp “B”.

I want to fetch rows from “TABLE” which is sorted by “A” that is nearest to “C” and hasn’t passed “B” yet. How do I do that?

I know how to query the condition now() <= “B”. But I can’t do the sorting in a single query.
What’s the most efficient way of doing this?

Answer 1

As long as you didn’t say what database server you use, here is a tip:

WHERE timestamp_b >= current_timestamp
ORDER BY ABS(timestamp_c - timestamp_a)

This way you’ll get the events that has timestamp_b that hasn’t passed yet and ordered by the “closeness” to timestamp_a