Select Most Recent States From History Table

Question

I have inherited a table with a structure something like this:

ID   Name   Timestamp   Data
----------------------------
1    A      40          ...
2    A      30          ...
3    A      20          ...
4    B      40          ...
5    B      20          ...
6    C      30          ...
7    C      20          ...
8    C      10          ...

ID is an identity field and the primary key and there are non-unique indexes on the Name and Timestamp fields.

What is the most efficient way to get the most recent record for each item name, i.e. in the table above rows 1,4 and 6 should be returned as they are the most up-to-date entries for items A,B and C respectively.

Answer 1

SQL Server 2005 (onwards):

WITH MostRecentRows AS
(
    SELECT ID, Name, Data,
    ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY Name ORDER BY TimeStamp DESC) AS 'RowNumber'
    FROM MySchema.MyTable
) 
SELECT * FROM MostRecentRows 
WHERE RowNumber = 1

Answer 2

Assuming there are no duplicate timestamps per name, something like this should work:

SELECT ID, Name, Timestamp, Data
FROM test AS o
WHERE o.Timestamp = (SELECT MAX(Timestamp)
                     FROM test as i
                     WHERE i.name = o.name)

Answer 3

SQL Server 2000:

SELECT
  ID, Name, Timestamp, Data
FROM
  DataTable
  INNER JOIN
  (
     SELECT ID, MAX(Timestamp) Timestamp FROM DataTable GROUP BY ID
  ) latest ON 
    DataTable.ID = Latest.ID AND 
    DataTable.Timestamp = Latest.Timestamp