I have a table that is a collection entries as to when a user was logged on.
username, date, value
--------------------------
brad, 1/2/2010, 1.1
fred, 1/3/2010, 1.0
bob, 8/4/2009, 1.5
brad, 2/2/2010, 1.2
fred, 12/2/2009, 1.3
etc..
How do I create a query that would give me the latest date for each user?
Update: I forgot that I needed to have a value that goes along with the latest date.
This is the simple old school approach that works with almost any db engine, but you have to watch out for duplicates:
select t.username, t.date, t.value
from MyTable t
inner join (
select username, max(date) as MaxDate
from MyTable
group by username
) tm on t.username = tm.username and t.date = tm.MaxDate
Using window functions will avoid any possible issues with duplicate records due to duplicate date values, so if your db engine allows it you can do something like this:
select x.username, x.date, x.value
from (
select username, date, value,
row_number() over (partition by username order by date desc) as _rn
from MyTable
) x
where x._rn = 1