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

I've just been dealing with pretty much exactly the same problem and found these answers helpful. My testing seems to suggest you can make it slightly simpler than the accepted answer, viz.:

SELECT u.*, p.method, p.id AS payment_id 
FROM `users` u, `payments` p
WHERE u.id = p.user_id 
    AND p.id = (SELECT MAX(p2.id) FROM payments p2
                    WHERE p2.user_id = u.id);

I've not performance tested the differences but the db I'm working on has over 50,000 Users and over 60,000 payments and the query runs in 0.024 seconds.