> I'm after some best-practice advice regarding SQL database design. > > I have a table (say "artist", couldn't resist...) that has a one-to-many > relationship to another table (say "album"). The album table has a field which > references the artist table's ID. So one artist can have many albums. > > So, if I want to know all of an artist's albums, that's easy. > > But what if I want to fetch an artist's details and his latest album? I can > select > the artist from the artists table and then join the albums table. But to get > the > latest album I'd have to use a max function (say on the album's date), with > which it isn't possible to get the related fields in the same row. > > I see 2 ways of solving this: > > - Run multiple queries to get the relevant album's ID (if even possible) and > then retrieve its row in entirety. > > - Have a reference from the artist table back to the album table, specifying > which is the latest album, which I update each time the albums table is > updated. > > Neither seem particularly tidy to me, so am I missing something completely > obvious?
Could you select all albums, ORDER BY date DESC LIMIT 1 ? Adam