MySQL JOIN the most recent row only?

I have a table customer that stores a customer_id, email and reference. There is an additional table customer_data that stores a historical record of the changes made to the customer, i.e. when there's a change made a new row is inserted.

In order to display the customer information in a table, the two tables need to be joined, however only the most recent row from customer_data should be joined to the customer table.

It gets a little more complicated in that the query is paginated, so has a limit and an offset.

How can I do this with MySQL? I think I'm wanting to put a DISTINCT in there somewhere...

The query at the minute is like this-

SELECT *, CONCAT(title,' ',forename,' ',surname) AS name
FROM customer c
INNER JOIN customer_data d on c.customer_id=d.customer_id
WHERE name LIKE '%Smith%' LIMIT 10, 20

Additionaly, am I right in thinking I can use CONCAT with LIKE in this way?

(I appreciate that INNER JOIN might be the wrong type of JOIN to use. I actually have no clue what the difference is between the different JOINs. I'm going to look into that now!)

Solution 1:

You may want to try the following:

SELECT    CONCAT(title, ' ', forename, ' ', surname) AS name
FROM      customer c
JOIN      (
              SELECT    MAX(id) max_id, customer_id 
              FROM      customer_data 
              GROUP BY  customer_id
          ) c_max ON (c_max.customer_id = c.customer_id)
JOIN      customer_data cd ON (cd.id = c_max.max_id)
WHERE     CONCAT(title, ' ', forename, ' ', surname) LIKE '%Smith%' 
LIMIT     10, 20;

Note that a JOIN is just a synonym for INNER JOIN.

Test case:

CREATE TABLE customer (customer_id int);
CREATE TABLE customer_data (
   id int, 
   customer_id int, 
   title varchar(10),
   forename varchar(10),
   surname varchar(10)
);

INSERT INTO customer VALUES (1);
INSERT INTO customer VALUES (2);
INSERT INTO customer VALUES (3);

INSERT INTO customer_data VALUES (1, 1, 'Mr', 'Bobby', 'Smith');
INSERT INTO customer_data VALUES (2, 1, 'Mr', 'Bob', 'Smith');
INSERT INTO customer_data VALUES (3, 2, 'Mr', 'Jane', 'Green');
INSERT INTO customer_data VALUES (4, 2, 'Miss', 'Jane', 'Green');
INSERT INTO customer_data VALUES (5, 3, 'Dr', 'Jack', 'Black');

Result (query without the LIMIT and WHERE):

SELECT    CONCAT(title, ' ', forename, ' ', surname) AS name
FROM      customer c
JOIN      (
              SELECT    MAX(id) max_id, customer_id 
              FROM      customer_data 
              GROUP BY  customer_id
          ) c_max ON (c_max.customer_id = c.customer_id)
JOIN      customer_data cd ON (cd.id = c_max.max_id);

+-----------------+
| name            |
+-----------------+
| Mr Bob Smith    |
| Miss Jane Green |
| Dr Jack Black   |
+-----------------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Solution 2:

If you are working with heavy queries, you better move the request for the latest row in the where clause. It is a lot faster and looks cleaner.

SELECT c.*,
FROM client AS c
LEFT JOIN client_calling_history AS cch ON cch.client_id = c.client_id
WHERE
   cch.cchid = (
      SELECT MAX(cchid)
      FROM client_calling_history
      WHERE client_id = c.client_id AND cal_event_id = c.cal_event_id
   )

Solution 3:

Presuming the autoincrement column in customer_data is named Id, you can do:

SELECT CONCAT(title,' ',forename,' ',surname) AS name *
FROM customer c
    INNER JOIN customer_data d 
        ON c.customer_id=d.customer_id
WHERE name LIKE '%Smith%'
    AND d.ID = (
                Select Max(D2.Id)
                From customer_data As D2
                Where D2.customer_id = D.customer_id
                )
LIMIT 10, 20

Solution 4:

For anyone who must work with an older version of MySQL (pre-5.0 ish) you are unable to do sub-queries for this type of query. Here is the solution I was able to do and it seemed to work great.

SELECT MAX(d.id), d2.*, CONCAT(title,' ',forename,' ',surname) AS name
FROM customer AS c 
LEFT JOIN customer_data as d ON c.customer_id=d.customer_id 
LEFT JOIN customer_data as d2 ON d.id=d2.id
WHERE CONCAT(title, ' ', forename, ' ', surname) LIKE '%Smith%'
GROUP BY c.customer_id LIMIT 10, 20;

Essentially this is finding the max id of your data table joining it to the customer then joining the data table to the max id found. The reason for this is because selecting the max of a group doesn't guarantee that the rest of the data matches with the id unless you join it back onto itself.

I haven't tested this on newer versions of MySQL but it works on 4.0.30.