How can I SELECT rows with MAX(Column value), DISTINCT by another column in SQL?

My table is:

id  home  datetime     player   resource
---|-----|------------|--------|---------
1  | 10  | 04/03/2009 | john   | 399 
2  | 11  | 04/03/2009 | juliet | 244
5  | 12  | 04/03/2009 | borat  | 555
3  | 10  | 03/03/2009 | john   | 300
4  | 11  | 03/03/2009 | juliet | 200
6  | 12  | 03/03/2009 | borat  | 500
7  | 13  | 24/12/2008 | borat  | 600
8  | 13  | 01/01/2009 | borat  | 700

I need to select each distinct home holding the maximum value of datetime.

Result would be:

id  home  datetime     player   resource 
---|-----|------------|--------|---------
1  | 10  | 04/03/2009 | john   | 399
2  | 11  | 04/03/2009 | juliet | 244
5  | 12  | 04/03/2009 | borat  | 555
8  | 13  | 01/01/2009 | borat  | 700

I have tried:

-- 1 ..by the MySQL manual: 

SELECT DISTINCT
  home,
  id,
  datetime AS dt,
  player,
  resource
FROM topten t1
WHERE datetime = (SELECT
  MAX(t2.datetime)
FROM topten t2
GROUP BY home)
GROUP BY datetime
ORDER BY datetime DESC

Doesn't work. Result-set has 130 rows although database holds 187. Result includes some duplicates of home.

-- 2 ..join

SELECT
  s1.id,
  s1.home,
  s1.datetime,
  s1.player,
  s1.resource
FROM topten s1
JOIN (SELECT
  id,
  MAX(datetime) AS dt
FROM topten
GROUP BY id) AS s2
  ON s1.id = s2.id
ORDER BY datetime 

Nope. Gives all the records.

-- 3 ..something exotic: 

With various results.

 Answers

You are so close! All you need to do is select BOTH the home and its max date time, then join back to the topten table on BOTH fields:

SELECT tt.*
FROM topten tt
INNER JOIN
    (SELECT home, MAX(datetime) AS MaxDateTime
    FROM topten
    GROUP BY home) groupedtt 
ON tt.home = groupedtt.home 
AND tt.datetime = groupedtt.MaxDateTime

---

The fastest MySQL solution, without inner queries and without GROUP BY:

SELECT m.*                    -- get the row that contains the max value
FROM topten m                 -- "m" from "max"
    LEFT JOIN topten b        -- "b" from "bigger"
        ON m.home = b.home    -- match "max" row with "bigger" row by `home`
        AND m.datetime < b.datetime           -- want "bigger" than "max"
WHERE b.datetime IS NULL      -- keep only if there is no bigger than max

Explanation:

Join the table with itself using the home column. The use of LEFT JOIN ensures all the rows from table m appear in the result set. Those that don't have a match in table b will have NULLs for the columns of b.

The other condition on the JOIN asks to match only the rows from b that have bigger value on the datetime column than the row from m.

Using the data posted in the question, the LEFT JOIN will produce this pairs:

+------------------------------------------+--------------------------------+
|              the row from `m`            |    the matching row from `b`   |
|------------------------------------------|--------------------------------|
| id  home  datetime     player   resource | id    home   datetime      ... |
|----|-----|------------|--------|---------|------|------|------------|-----|
| 1  | 10  | 04/03/2009 | john   | 399     | NULL | NULL | NULL       | ... | *
| 2  | 11  | 04/03/2009 | juliet | 244     | NULL | NULL | NULL       | ... | *
| 5  | 12  | 04/03/2009 | borat  | 555     | NULL | NULL | NULL       | ... | *
| 3  | 10  | 03/03/2009 | john   | 300     | 1    | 10   | 04/03/2009 | ... |
| 4  | 11  | 03/03/2009 | juliet | 200     | 2    | 11   | 04/03/2009 | ... |
| 6  | 12  | 03/03/2009 | borat  | 500     | 5    | 12   | 04/03/2009 | ... |
| 7  | 13  | 24/12/2008 | borat  | 600     | 8    | 13   | 01/01/2009 | ... |
| 8  | 13  | 01/01/2009 | borat  | 700     | NULL | NULL | NULL       | ... | *
+------------------------------------------+--------------------------------+

Finally, the WHERE clause keeps only the pairs that have NULLs in the columns of b (they are marked with * in the table above); this means, due to the second condition from the JOIN clause, the row selected from m has the biggest value in column datetime.

Read the SQL Antipatterns: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Database Programming book for other SQL tips.

---

I think this will give you the desired result:

SELECT   home, MAX(datetime)
FROM     my_table
GROUP BY home

BUT if you need other columns as well, just make a join with the original table (check Michael La Voie answer)

Best regards.

---

You can also try this one and for large tables query performance will be better. It works when there no more than two records for each home and their dates are different. Better general MySQL query is one from Michael La Voie above.

SELECT t1.id, t1.home, t1.date, t1.player, t1.resource
FROM   t_scores_1 t1 
INNER JOIN t_scores_1 t2
   ON t1.home = t2.home
WHERE t1.date > t2.date

Or in case of Postgres or those dbs that provide analytic functions try

SELECT t.* FROM 
(SELECT t1.id, t1.home, t1.date, t1.player, t1.resource
  , row_number() over (partition by t1.home order by t1.date desc) rw
 FROM   topten t1 
 INNER JOIN topten t2
   ON t1.home = t2.home
 WHERE t1.date > t2.date 
) t
WHERE t.rw = 1

---

SELECT  tt.*
FROM    TestTable tt 
INNER JOIN 
        (
        SELECT  coord, MAX(datetime) AS MaxDateTime 
        FROM    rapsa 
        GROUP BY
                krd 
        ) groupedtt
ON      tt.coord = groupedtt.coord
        AND tt.datetime = groupedtt.MaxDateTime

---

SELECT c1, c2, c3, c4, c5 FROM table1 WHERE c3 = (select max(c3) from table)

SELECT * FROM table1 WHERE c3 = (select max(c3) from table1)

---

Try this

select * from mytable a join
(select home, max(datetime) datetime
from mytable
group by home) b
 on a.home = b.home and a.datetime = b.datetime

Regards K

---

Why not using: SELECT home, MAX(datetime) AS MaxDateTime,player,resource FROM topten GROUP BY home Did I miss something?

---

@Michae The accepted answer will working fine in most of the cases but it fail for one for as below.

In case if there were 2 rows having HomeID and Datetime same the query will return both rows, not distinct HomeID as required, for that add Distinct in query as below.

SELECT DISTINCT tt.home  , tt.MaxDateTime
FROM topten tt
INNER JOIN
    (SELECT home, MAX(datetime) AS MaxDateTime
    FROM topten
    GROUP BY home) groupedtt 
ON tt.home = groupedtt.home 
AND tt.datetime = groupedtt.MaxDateTime

SQL select only rows with max value on a column

I have this table for documents (simplified version here):

+------+-------+--------------------------------------+
| id   | rev   | content                              |
+------+-------+--------------------------------------+
| 1    | 1     | ...                                  |
| 2    | 1     | ...                                  |
| 1    | 2     | ...                                  |
| 1    | 3     | ...                                  |
+------+-------+--------------------------------------+

How do I select one row per id and only the greatest rev?
With the above data, the result should contain two rows: [1, 3, ...] and [2, 1, ..]. I'm using MySQL.

Currently I use checks in the while loop to detect and over-write old revs from the resultset. But is this the only method to achieve the result? Isn't there a SQL solution?

 Answers

At first glance...

All you need is a GROUP BY clause with the MAX aggregate function:

SELECT id, MAX(rev)
FROM YourTable
GROUP BY id

It's never that simple, is it?

I just noticed you need the content column as well.

This is a very common question in SQL: find the whole data for the row with some max value in a column per some group identifier. I heard that a lot during my career. Actually, it was one the questions I answered in my current job's technical interview.

It is, actually, so common that community has created a single tag just to deal with questions like that: greatest-n-per-group.

Basically, you have two approaches to solve that problem:

Joining with simple group-identifier, max-value-in-group Sub-query

In this approach, you first find the group-identifier, max-value-in-group (already solved above) in a sub-query. Then you join your table to the sub-query with equality on both group-identifier and max-value-in-group:

SELECT a.id, a.rev, a.contents
FROM YourTable a
INNER JOIN (
    SELECT id, MAX(rev) rev
    FROM YourTable
    GROUP BY id
) b ON a.id = b.id AND a.rev = b.rev

Left Joining with self, tweaking join conditions and filters

In this approach, you left join the table with itself. Equality, of course, goes in the group-identifier. Then, 2 smart moves:

1. The second join condition is having left side value less than right value
2. When you do step 1, the row(s) that actually have the max value will have NULL in the right side (it's a LEFT JOIN, remember?). Then, we filter the joined result, showing only the rows where the right side is NULL.

So you end up with:

SELECT a.*
FROM YourTable a
LEFT OUTER JOIN YourTable b
    ON a.id = b.id AND a.rev < b.rev
WHERE b.id IS NULL;

Conclusion

Both approaches bring the exact same result.

If you have two rows with max-value-in-group for group-identifier, both rows will be in the result in both approaches.

Both approaches are SQL ANSI compatible, thus, will work with your favorite RDBMS, regardless of its "flavor".

Both approaches are also performance friendly, however your mileage may vary (RDBMS, DB Structure, Indexes, etc.). So when you pick one approach over the other, benchmark. And make sure you pick the one which make most of sense to you.

---

Yet another solution is to use a correlated subquery:

select yt.id, yt.rev, yt.contents
    from YourTable yt
    where rev = 
        (select max(rev) from YourTable st where yt.id=st.id)

Having an index on (id,rev) renders the subquery almost as a simple lookup...

Following are comparisons to the solutions in @AdrianCarneiro's answer (subquery, leftjoin), based on MySQL measurements with InnoDB table of ~1million records, group size being: 1-3.

While for full table scans subquery/leftjoin/correlated timings relate to each other as 6/8/9, when it comes to direct lookups or batch (id in (1,2,3)), subquery is much slower then the others (Due to rerunning the subquery). However I couldnt differentiate between leftjoin and correlated solutions in speed.

One final note, as leftjoin creates n*(n+1)/2 joins in groups, its performance can be heavily affected by the size of groups...

---

I am flabbergasted that no answer offered SQL window function solution:

SELECT a.id, a.rev, a.contents
  FROM (SELECT id, rev, contents,
               ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY id ORDER BY rev DESC) rank
          FROM YourTable) a
 WHERE a.rank = 1 

Added in SQL standard ANSI/ISO Standard SQL:2003 and later extended with ANSI/ISO Standard SQL:2008, window (or windowing) functions are available with all major vendors now. There are more types of rank functions available to deal with a tie issue: RANK, DENSE_RANK, PERSENT_RANK.

---

Something like this?

SELECT yourtable.id, rev, content
FROM yourtable
INNER JOIN (
    SELECT id, max(rev) as maxrev FROM yourtable
    WHERE yourtable
    GROUP BY id
) AS child ON (yourtable.id = child.id) AND (yourtable.rev = maxrev)

---

A third solution I hardly ever see mentioned is MySQL specific and looks like this:

SELECT id, MAX(rev) AS rev
 , 0+SUBSTRING_INDEX(GROUP_CONCAT(numeric_content ORDER BY rev DESC), ',', 1) AS numeric_content
FROM t1
GROUP BY id

Yes it looks awful (converting to string and back etc.) but in my experience it's usually faster than the other solutions. Maybe that just for my use cases, but I have used it on tables with millions of records and many unique ids. Maybe it's because MySQL is pretty bad at optimizing the other solutions (at least in the 5.0 days when I came up with this solution).

One important thing is that GROUP_CONCAT has a maximum length for the string it can build up. You probably want to raise this limit by setting the group_concat_max_len variable. And keep in mind that this will be a limit on scaling if you have a large number of rows.

Anyway, the above doesn't directly work if your content field is already text. In that case you probably want to use a different separator, like \0 maybe. You'll also run into the group_concat_max_len limit quicker.

---

How about this:

select all_fields.*  
from  (select id, MAX(rev) from yourtable group by id) as max_recs  
left outer join yourtable as all_fields  
on max_recs.id = all_fields.id

---

If you have many fields in select statement and you want latest value for all of those fields through optimized code:

select * from
(select * from table_name
order by id,rev desc) temp
group by id 

---

NOT mySQL, but for other people finding this question and using SQL, another way to resolve the greatest-n-per-group problem is using Cross Apply in MS SQL

WITH DocIds AS (SELECT DISTINCT id FROM docs)

SELECT d2.id, d2.rev, d2.content
FROM DocIds d1
CROSS APPLY (
  SELECT Top 1 * FROM docs d
  WHERE d.id = d1.id
  ORDER BY rev DESC
) d2

I like to do this by ranking the records by some column. In this case, rank rev values grouped by id. Those with higher rev will have lower rankings. So highest rev will have ranking of 1.

select id, rev, content
from
 (select
    @rowNum := if(@prevValue = id, @rowNum+1, 1) as row_num,
    id, rev, content,
    @prevValue := id
  from
   (select id, rev, content from YOURTABLE order by id asc, rev desc) TEMP,
   (select @rowNum := 1 from DUAL) X,
   (select @prevValue := -1 from DUAL) Y) TEMP
where row_num = 1;

Not sure if introducing variables makes the whole thing slower. But at least I'm not querying YOURTABLE twice.

---

here is another solution hope it will help someone

Select a.id , a.rev, a.content from Table1 a
inner join 
(SELECT id, max(rev) rev FROM Table1 GROUP BY id) x on x.id =a.id and x.rev =a.rev

---

SELECT * FROM Employee where Employee.Salary in (select max(salary) from Employee group by Employe_id) ORDER BY Employee.Salary

---

Many, if not all, of the other answers here are fine for small datasets. For scaling, more care is needed. See here.

It discusses multiple faster ways to do groupwise max and top-N per group.

---

I used the below to solve a problem of my own. I first created a temp table and inserted the max rev value per unique id.

CREATE TABLE #temp1
(
    id varchar(20)
    , rev int
)
INSERT INTO #temp1
SELECT a.id, MAX(a.rev) as rev
FROM 
    (
        SELECT id, content, SUM(rev) as rev
        FROM YourTable
        GROUP BY id, content
    ) as a 
GROUP BY a.id
ORDER BY a.id

I then joined these max values (#temp1) to all of the possible id/content combinations. By doing this, I naturally filter out the non-maximum id/content combinations, and am left with the only max rev values for each.

SELECT a.id, a.rev, content
FROM #temp1 as a
LEFT JOIN
    (
        SELECT id, content, SUM(rev) as rev
        FROM YourTable
        GROUP BY id, content
    ) as b on a.id = b.id and a.rev = b.rev
GROUP BY a.id, a.rev, b.content
ORDER BY a.id

---

select * from yourtable
group by id
having rev=max(rev);

---

SELECT * FROM t1 ORDER BY rev DESC LIMIT 1;

mysql query does not return specific rows with max (id)

I am using a subquery to get the maximum id from a group.

The query is returning the correct max(id) from a group. But what I want as a result out of this table:

id--------Name--------GROUP------------Result

1---------ABC----------A----------------Pass

2---------DEF----------B----------------FAIL

3---------GEH----------A----------------Pass

4---------ABC----------B----------------FAIL

5---------DEF----------A----------------FAIL

6---------GEH----------B----------------PASS

Is max id's of each group with a result of pass students only?

sorry for the kind of English used to describe my problem.

---

@Narayan-this will give the max(id) for each group for students with Result as Pass

SELECT MAX(ID)
FROM YourTable
WHERE Result = 'PASS'
GROUP BY `GROUP`;




MySQL max () - does not return the max () value

I have a query which I want to return the highest id value in idevent that is within a given range of sensor ID's (sensorID) however the query is not returning the highest value.

The results when I run the query minus the max() statment:

mysql> SELECT * FROM events WHERE timestamp BETWEEN "2015-03-09 10:45:35" - INTERVAL 4000 SECOND AND "2015-03-09 10:45:35" AND (sensorID = 34035434 OR sensorID = 34035492 OR sensorID = 34035426 OR sensorID = 34035482 OR sensorID = 34035125 OR sensorID = 34035498 OR sensorID = 34035508 OR sensorID = 34035444 OR sensorID = 34035418 OR sensorID = 34035466 OR sensorID = 34035128 OR sensorID = 34035119 OR sensorID = 34035448 OR sensorID = 34037294 OR sensorID = 34035549);
+---------+---------------------+----------+-------+
| idevent | timestamp           | sensorID | event |
+---------+---------------------+----------+-------+
|  117794 | 2015-03-09 10:14:58 | 34035434 |     9 |
|  117795 | 2015-03-09 10:15:03 | 34035508 |     9 |
|  117796 | 2015-03-09 10:15:17 | 34035508 |     1 |
+---------+---------------------+----------+-------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

The results given when the max() statement is added as a HAVING clause:

mysql> SELECT * FROM events WHERE timestamp BETWEEN "2015-03-09 10:45:35" - INTERVAL 4000 SECOND AND "2015-03-09 10:45:35" AND (sensorID = 34035434 OR sensorID = 34035492 OR sensorID = 34035426 OR sensorID = 34035482 OR sensorID = 34035125 OR sensorID = 34035498 OR sensorID = 34035508 OR sensorID = 34035444 OR sensorID = 34035418 OR sensorID = 34035466 OR sensorID = 34035128 OR sensorID = 34035119 OR sensorID = 34035448 OR sensorID = 34037294 OR sensorID = 34035549) HAVING max(idevent);
+---------+---------------------+----------+-------+
| idevent | timestamp           | sensorID | event |
+---------+---------------------+----------+-------+
|  117794 | 2015-03-09 10:14:58 | 34035434 |     9 |
+---------+---------------------+----------+-------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Why is this not returning the lastest value?

---

This could be done with order by limit, so all you need to add the following at the end of the given first query

order by idevent desc limit 1