SQL Server SELECT LAST N Rows

Question

This is a known question but the best solution I\'ve found is something like:

SELECT TOP N *
FROM MyTable
ORDER BY Id DESC

I\'ve a table wi

Answer 1

select * from (select top 6 * from vwTable order by Hours desc) T order by Hours

Answer 2

This may not be quite the right fit to the question, but…

OFFSET clause

The OFFSET number clause enables you to skip over a number of rows and then return rows after that.

That doc link is to Postgres; I don't know if this applies to Sybase/MS SQL Server.

Answer 3

I tested JonVD's code, but found it was very slow, 6s.

This code took 0s.

SELECT TOP(5) ORDERID, CUSTOMERID, OrderDate    
FROM Orders where EmployeeID=5    
Order By OrderDate DESC

Answer 4

use desc with orderby at the end of the query to get the last values.

Answer 5

If you want to select last numbers of rows from a table.

Syntax will be like

 select * from table_name except select top 
 (numbers of rows - how many rows you want)* from table_name

These statements work but differrent ways. thank you guys.

 select * from Products except select top (77-10) * from Products

in this way you can get last 10 rows but order will show descnding way

select top 10 * from products
 order by productId desc 

---

 select * from products
 where productid in (select top 10 productID from products)
 order by productID desc

---

 select * from products where productID not in 
 (select top((select COUNT(*) from products ) -10 )productID from products)

Answer 6

A technique I use to query the MOST RECENT rows in very large tables (100+ million or 1+ billion rows) is limiting the query to "reading" only the most recent "N" percentage of RECENT ROWS. This is real world applications, for example I do this for non-historic Recent Weather Data, or recent News feed searches or Recent GPS location data point data.

This is a huge performance improvement if you know for certain that your rows are in the most recent TOP 5% of the table for example. Such that even if there are indexes on the Tables, it further limits the possibilites to only 5% of rows in tables which have 100+ million or 1+ billion rows. This is especially the case when Older Data will require Physical Disk reads and not only Logical In Memory reads.

This is well more efficient than SELECT TOP | PERCENT | LIMIT as it does not select the rows, but merely limit the portion of the data to be searched.

DECLARE @RowIdTableA BIGINT
DECLARE @RowIdTableB BIGINT
DECLARE @TopPercent FLOAT

-- Given that there is an Sequential Identity Column
-- Limit query to only rows in the most recent TOP 5% of rows
SET @TopPercent = .05
SELECT @RowIdTableA = (MAX(TableAId) - (MAX(TableAId) * @TopPercent)) FROM TableA
SELECT @RowIdTableB = (MAX(TableBId) - (MAX(TableBId) * @TopPercent)) FROM TableB

SELECT *
FROM TableA a
INNER JOIN TableB b ON a.KeyId = b.KeyId
WHERE a.Id > @RowIdTableA AND b.Id > @RowIdTableB AND
      a.SomeOtherCriteria = 'Whatever'