Getting the last 5 entries from a table ..

[Bob [Nescience.org]]

Hey,

I have been doing some work for someone, and I was just wondering .. how do I grab the last 5 entries from a table?

My problem is, lets say the last entry to the table has an ID of 25, that doesn't necessarily that ID number 24 precedes it, ID 24 might have been deleted or whatever, the IDs are in numerical order, going upwards from 1 .. its just that not all the IDs will still be there .. sorry if I explained that wrong.

So, can anyone help me get the last 5 entries to a table?

Thanks for any and all help recieved.

[cupid]

There should be a far better approach than this, as this makes a redundant query and therefore inefficient. Hopefully someone can find a better solution.

//selecting id only to minimize query cost
$maxNum = mysql_num_rows(mysql_query("select id from tablename"));

$query = mysql_query("select * from tablename limit ".($maxNum - 5).", $maxNum");

while ($result = mysql_fetch_object($query)) {
    //blah
    //blah
} 

[Renegade]

Try this little snip:

$sql = "SELECT * FROM <tablename> ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 5"; 

That SQL statement, will sort the table by id (ORDER BY id), in reverse order (DESC) and limit the returned results to 5 (LIMIT 5)

Hope that helps

[Bob [Nescience.org]]

Thanks a lot both of you!!