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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-11T19:02:05+00:00

The query below is perfectly functional, and queries a single table to find the

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The query below is perfectly functional, and queries a single table to find the last 50 usernames added via a sequential userid number column.

Logic so far is to: find out the highest userid; subtract 50 from that; pull usernames back where greater.

However, it doesn’t look elegant, and uses two subqueries to achieve it’s goal: 

SELECT username  
FROM table  
WHERE userid IN  
  (SELECT userid  
   FROM table  
   WHERE userid >  
    (SELECT MAX(userid) -50  
     FROM table))

Is there a way to make this less nested? More efficient? More elegant? Any help would be much appreciated, as this can’t be the best way!

Cheers & many thanks
Ali

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The answers provided are along the right lines.
    You can use ROWNUM to select TOP-N style results.

    Please be careful though and note that the rownum is assigned to the query results after predication but before the ORDER BY. Try something like the following:

    SELECT username  
FROM 
  (SELECT username  
   FROM table  
   ORDER BY userid DESC)
WHERE rownum <= 50
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