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SQL Antipatterns
book

SQL Antipatterns

by Bill Karwin
June 2010
Intermediate to advanced
328 pages
7h 51m
English
Pragmatic Bookshelf
Content preview from SQL Antipatterns

Objective: Get Row with Greatest Value per Group

Most programmers who learn SQL get to the stage of using GROUP BY in a query, applying some aggregate function to groups of rows, and getting a result with one row per group. This is a powerful feature that makes it easy to get a wide variety of complex reports using relatively little code.

For example, a query to get the latest bug reported for each product in the bugs database looks like this:

Groups/anti/groupbyproduct.sql
 
SELECT​ product_id, MAX(date_reported) ​AS​ latest
 
FROM​ Bugs ​JOIN​ BugsProducts ​USING​ (bug_id)
 
GROUP​ ​BY​ product_id;

A natural extension to this query is to request the ID of the specific bug with the latest date reported:

Groups/anti/groupbyproduct.sql
 
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781680500073Errata Page