selecting the newest entries in a table

[counterclockwis]

heya all, new here - first post

this is a bit of a cross category question, but i think it's most applicable here. I am writing a news script, that pulls news items and comments and so on from a few tables in a mySQL database. My poroblem is I only want it to select the newest 5 entries by default (this number should be easily changable). I can see 2 ways around it - the news tabel has an auto incrementing proimary key, so the highest 5 entries in that should be the newest 5 entries.... but that isn't very neat. The tabel also has a date field and atime field, so a combination of those would also work... problem is i can't think how to implement it. I dont ,mid if it's in the scrip after the MySQL query, or inside the query, but in the query would be more memory effecient i imaging.

Thanks in advance,
Josh

[AstroTeg]

SELECT [releated fields] FROM [your table] ORDER BY [your date field] DESC LIMIT 5

Just off the top of my memory. I might have something backwards, but it should be a start.

Basically, use ORDER BY and your date field filter the most recent news items. Don't do this with auto IDs. It sounds like a good idea at first until you start deleting some. Then you have a mess.

The LIMIT clause will limit the number of records brought back. Check out mysql.com for more tricks you can do with LIMIT.

[counterclockwis]

thanks for the quick reply =)

yeah, i'm already using order by, so should just go in fine

thanks a lot, i'll go try it out,
Josh