Is there any way to pull the first 2, most recent records out of a DB using SQL or do I have to use dates and compare the dates?

You'll have to use a comparison on an appropriate date column, because the concept of "recent" does not apply in a relational database. The rows in a table are inherently unordered, so asking for the most "recent" rows is meaningless, unless they are explicitly ordered by a date(time) value.

Jeff Mason
Custom Apps, Inc.
www.custom-apps.com

Thanks for your reply.

That's what I thought... I just wanted to make sure.

Why can't you do "Select top 2 * from tableName order by last_update_date desc"?

What if there is no last_update_date? The OP didn't give us his table structure...

Jeff Mason
Custom Apps, Inc.
www.custom-apps.com

Jeff,

"last_update"date is just a sample column name. You can just replace it with the actual column name (the "appropriate date column" you refer to in your post). Sorry, thought that was clear.

Jim

Fair enough.

The point I was trying to make was that the concept of "recent" has no meaning in SQL unless there is some appropriate column to order by.

A file system typically appends new records to the end of the file; retrieving the last two such records is easy. The concept here of "recent" is inherent in the fact that records are added to the end: the records are implicitly ordered by time.

A relational database is not a file system, so none of these concepts apply (concepts like "record", "end", "file", etc). It is true that some systems may assign a unique row identifier as rows are inserted or updated, but there may be no guarantee that these identifiers are monotonically increasing with respect to time, which is what I interpret "recent" to mean...

You are correct that if an appropriate ordering column exists, that the SQL Server 'TOP' clause is a way to retrieve the most recent rows; there are other ways as well (and you may need them if your RDBMS doesn't implement TOP.)

Jeff Mason
Custom Apps, Inc.
www.custom-apps.com