SQL join: selecting the last records in a one-to-many relationship

Question

Suppose I have a table of customers and a table of purchases. Each purchase belongs to one customer. I want to get a list of all customers along with their last purchase in

Answer 1

Another approach would be to use a NOT EXISTS condition in your join condition to test for later purchases:

SELECT *
FROM customer c
LEFT JOIN purchase p ON (
       c.id = p.customer_id
   AND NOT EXISTS (
     SELECT 1 FROM purchase p1
     WHERE p1.customer_id = c.id
     AND p1.id > p.id
   )
)