Question

thanks for taking the time to help me out! I’m trying to make SQL do something that I imagine is easy for anybody who knows SQL, but I’m beating my head against at this point.

I have me a little table like this –

Update   Order    UpdateDate                OrderDate
9297    3590    2012-12-06                    2012-12-06 
9298    3590    2012-12-06                    2012-12-06 
9356    3590    2012-12-07                    2012-12-06 
9369    3590    2012-12-08                    2012-12-06 
9381    3590    2012-12-10                    2012-12-06 

My goal is to find orders that have not been updated in the last 3 days.

The ugly version of what I’m trying to do is something like this –

Select order from orderstable
where cast(max(updatedate)-getdate() as int) >3

The goal here is to have the command return “orders” that have not been updated in the last 3 days. My current problem is I don’t know how to make SQL focus on just the “most recent” updatedate for the order.

Answer 1

The easiest way is just a date comparison:

select *
from orderstable ot
where datediff(day, updatedate, getdate()) > 3

I see, you have multiple records for each order and you want orders that have no update in the past three days. I would do this with an aggregation:

select order
from orderstable ot
group by order
having min(datediff(day, updatedate, getdate())) > 3

You can also do it by looking for orders that don’t have updates in the last three days:

select distinct order
from orderstable
where order not in (select order
                    from orderstable
                    where datediff(day, updatedate, getdate()) <= 3)