Grouping by Column with Dependence on another Column

Question

Here is a simplified look at the problem I am trying to cleanly solve via a MySQL query. This is not the actual table I am dealing with.

If I have the following ta

Answer 1

Another alternative is to load the data sorted in a subquery, then group on the results. I can't cite this, but I've read in a few places there's no (discernable) performance hit on this.

So something like:

SELECT * 
FROM (
    SELECT * 
    FROM `yourtable` 
    ORDER BY `id` DESC
) as `tmp` 
GROUP BY `name`