[thelist] SQL Query

[Jack Timmons]

I think I'm having one of those days.

I'm trying to do a query to set up some data for an email. I'm doing
this in SQL instead of PHP because I can't trust others down the road
to replicate the PHP results exactly, but I can ensure the query
always does.

I have a table of customer charges. I want to find only the latest
paid_on for each customer. So, I did a query to order the results by
when it was paid_on descending, and grouped by ID.

Well, as you can imagine, no matter what I order in, I always get the
most recent charge.

Now, I know that doing the following query works out like I want it to:

SELECT * FROM (
    SELECT *
    FROM charges
    ORDER BY paid_on DESC
) as temp
GROUP BY id

My question: Is this the choice I have to take, or am I missing a key
thing so I only have to make one select statement? Unfortunately, this
Tuesday is Monday 2.0, so I'm not thinking as well as I should.

You can view the full mess here: http://pastebin.com/NfyaJ3ex

Also, if there's ways I can improve it, I'm open to suggestions.

-- 
-Jack Timmons
Blog: http://www.codeacula.com
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Twitter: @codeacula
Google Chat: Figure it out. C'mon, seriously.