How can I select rows with most recent timestamp for each key value?

Question

I have a table of sensor data. Each row has a sensor id, a timestamp, and other fields. I want to select a single row with latest timestamp for each sensor, including some o

Answer 1

There is one common answer I haven't see here yet, which is the Window Function. It is an alternative to the correlated sub-query, if your DB supports it.

SELECT sensorID,timestamp,sensorField1,sensorField2 
FROM (
    SELECT sensorID,timestamp,sensorField1,sensorField2
        , ROW_NUMBER() OVER(
            PARTITION BY sensorID
            ORDER BY timestamp
        ) AS rn
    FROM sensorTable s1
WHERE rn = 1
ORDER BY sensorID, timestamp;

I acually use this more than correlated sub-queries. Feel free to bust me in the comments over effeciancy, I'm not too sure how it stacks up in that regard.