Grabbing first and last inserted rows.

cookiecaper

How would I get only the first row and the last row in a database?

paul088

A not very efficient way is to have two separate queries, one order by something DESC limit 1, and another order by something ASC limit 1.

sivasankari_kv

You need to run two queries for this

Assumption:
ID is the primary key and it keeps increasing by some increment

For getting the first record

select * from sometable LIMIT 1;

For getting the last record
select *,max(ID) from TBL_CONTACT_MASTER GROUP BY ID DESC LIMIT 1;

This is a round about of way of doing things there may be a better way to do it

ajmoore

it shouldn't be necessary to run two queries to get the first and last value from a column....
why not just select the data, grab the first row, and use a while loop to cycle through until you get to the last row...something like this:

$sql = "SELECT * FROM table ORDER BY whatever";
$result = mysql_query($sql);
$firstRow = mysql_fetch_array($result);
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
     $lastRow = $row;
}
//one the loop is finished $lastRow will contain the last row

might not be the most efficient way to do things but it should work and w/ only one query.

Arc

I cant beleive there is no mysql_fetch_row command that lets you return any row you want. There is a mysql_fetch_row but it only returns the next row.

I also cant beleive there is no mysql_fetch_last_row....very odd

BuzzLY

mysql_data_seek(mysql_num_rows($result) - 1) will point to the last record. Then you can do a mysql_fetch_row() on it. This would be the equivalent of doing a mysql_fetch_last_row()...