Question

.what i want to do is to retrieve records from my database and display everything but the condition is not to display all records having the same task_id but to display only the newest among them. how do I select the newest among the records with the same task_id?

Answer 1

You will need a column like

last_modified TIMESTAMP

so each time a row is inserted, or updated, the last_modified column gets updated with the current timestamp. Then, all you need is a query like

SELECT *
  FROM tblTask
 WHERE task_id = n
 ORDER BY last_modified DESC
 LIMIT 5

Will fetch the latest 5 updated tasks from the database with the given task_id. Remove the WHERE clause to get the newest tasks regardless of the task_id.

note: the TIMESTAMP data type is special, in the sense that MySQL will update the field automatically, by default, to the current timestamp, unless a value is explicitly defined in the insert or update query. If this behavior is not wanted, use DATETIME, but it will require that you specify the column value for the new column (unless a default value is set in the table)