The solution looks sound. But I take issue with your assertion that it "doesn't use a join".
Your query involves two tables, so there is a join. Regards, Bill On 09/10/2014 17:57, Rob Lucas wrote:
Something like this? Doesn't use a join etc, but has the merit of simplicity. SELECT * FROM Artist, Album WHERE Artist.Id = $artist_id AND Album.ArtistId = $artist_id ORDER BY album.date DESC LIMIT 1? R -----Original Message----- From: london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Beverley Sent: 09 October 2014 13:29 To: london.pm Subject: Getting the "latest" related record from a SQL DB Hi guys, 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? Thanks, Andy
