Retrieving the most recent records within a query

Question

I have the following tables:

tblPerson:

PersonID | Name
---------------------
   1     | John Smith
   2     | Jane Doe
   3     | David Hoshi

tblLocation:

LocationID | Timestamp | PersonID | X | Y | Z | More Columns...
---------------------------------------------------------------
    40     | Jan. 1st  |     3    | 0 | 0 | 0 | More Info...
    41     | Jan. 2nd  |     1    | 1 | 1 | 0 | More Info...
    42     | Jan. 2nd  |     3    | 2 | 2 | 2 | More Info...
    43     | Jan. 3rd  |     3    | 4 | 4 | 4 | More Info...
    44     | Jan. 5th  |     2    | 0 | 0 | 0 | More Info...

I can produce an SQL query that gets the Location records for each Person like so:

SELECT LocationID, Timestamp, Name, X, Y, Z 
FROM tblLocation 
JOIN tblPerson 
ON tblLocation.PersonID = tblPerson.PersonID;

to produce the following:

LocationID | Timestamp |    Name     | X | Y | Z |
--------------------------------------------------
    40     | Jan. 1st  | David Hoshi | 0 | 0 | 0 |
    41     | Jan. 2nd  | John Smith  | 1 | 1 | 0 |
    42     | Jan. 2nd  | David Hoshi | 2 | 2 | 2 |
    43     | Jan. 3rd  | David Hoshi | 4 | 4 | 4 |
    44     | Jan. 5th  | Jane Doe    | 0 | 0 | 0 |

My issue is that we're only concerned with the most recent Location record. As such, we're only really interested in the following Rows: LocationID 41, 43, and 44.

The question is: How can we query these tables to give us the most recent data on a per-person basis? What special grouping needs to happen to produce the desired result?

Answer 1

MySQL doesn't have ranking/analytical/windowing functionality.

SELECT tl.locationid, tl.timestamp, tp.name, X, Y, Z
  FROM tblPerson tp
  JOIN tblLocation tl ON tl.personid = tp.personid
  JOIN (SELECT t.personid,
               MAX(t.timestamp) AS max_date
          FROM tblLocation t
      GROUP BY t.personid) x ON x.personid = tl.personid
                            AND x.max_date = tl.timestamp

SQL Server 2005+ and Oracle 9i+ support analytics, so you could use:

SELECT x.locationid, x.timestamp, x.name, x.X, x.Y, x.Z
  FROM (SELECT tl.locationid, tl.timestamp, tp.name, X, Y, Z,
               ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY tp.name ORDER BY tl.timestamp DESC) AS rank
          FROM tblPerson tp
          JOIN tblLocation tl ON tl.personid = tp.personid) x
WHERE x.rank = 1

Using a variable to get same as ROW_NUMBER functionality on MySQL:

SELECT x.locationid, x.timestamp, x.name, x.X, x.Y, x.Z
  FROM (SELECT tl.locationid, tl.timestamp, tp.name, X, Y, Z,
               CASE
                 WHEN @name != t.name THEN
                   @rownum := 1
                 ELSE @rownum := @rownum + 1
               END AS rank,
               @name := tp.name
          FROM tblLocation tl
          JOIN tblPerson tp ON tp.personid = tl.personid
          JOIN (SELECT @rownum := NULL, @name := '') r
      ORDER BY tp.name, tl.timestamp DESC) x
WHERE x.rank = 1

Answer 2

As @Mark Byers mentions, this problem comes up frequently on Stack Overflow.

Here's the solution I most frequently recommend, given your tables:

SELECT p.*, l1.*
FROM tblPerson p
JOIN tblLocation l1 ON p.PersonID = l1.PersonID
LEFT OUTER JOIN tblLocation l2 ON p.PersonID = l2.PersonID AND 
  (l1.timestamp < l2.timestamp OR l1.timestamp = l2.timestamp AND l1.LocationId < l2.LocationId)
WHERE l2.LocationID IS NULL;

To see other examples, follow the tag greatest-n-per-group, which I added to your question.