Select most recent row with GROUP BY in MySQL

Question

I\'m trying to select each user with their most recent payment. The query I have now selects the users first payment. I.e. if a user has made two payments and the paym

Answer 1

You want the groupwise maximum; in essence, group the payments table to identify the maximal records, then join the result back with itself to fetch the other columns:

SELECT users.*, payments.method, payments.id AS payment_id
FROM   payments NATURAL JOIN (
  SELECT   user_id, MAX(id) AS id 
  FROM     payments
  GROUP BY user_id
) t RIGHT JOIN users ON users.id = t.user_id

Note that MAX(id) may not be the "most recent payment", depending on your application and schema: it's usually better to determine "most recent" based off TIMESTAMP than based off synthetic identifiers such as an AUTO_INCREMENT primary key column.