MySQL sorting by date with GROUP BY

Question

My table titles looks like this

id |group|date                |title
---+-----+--------------------+--------
1  |1    |2012-07-26 18:59:30 | Title 1
2  |1    |2012-07-26 19:01:20 | Title 2
3  |2    |2012-07-26 19:18:15 | Title 3
4  |2    |2012-07-26 20:09:28 | Title 4
5  |2    |2012-07-26 23:59:52 | Title 5

I need latest result from each group ordered by date in descending order. Something like this

id |group|date                |title
---+-----+--------------------+--------
5  |2    |2012-07-26 23:59:52 | Title 5
2  |1    |2012-07-26 19:01:20 | Title 2

I tried

SELECT *
FROM `titles`
GROUP BY `group`
ORDER BY MAX( `date` ) DESC

but I'm geting first results from groups. Like this

id |group|date                |title
---+-----+--------------------+--------
3  |2    |2012-07-26 18:59:30 | Title 3
1  |1    |2012-07-26 19:18:15 | Title 1

What am I doing wrong? Is this query going to be more complicated if I use LEFT JOIN?

Answer 1

This page was very helpful to me; it taught me how to use self-joins to get the max/min/something-n rows per group.

In your situation, it can be applied to the effect you want like so:

SELECT * FROM
(SELECT group, MAX(date) AS date FROM titles GROUP BY group)
AS x JOIN titles USING (group, date);