3.5.1 The Maximum Value for a Column

``What's the highest item number?''

SELECT MAX(article) AS article FROM shop

+---------+
| article |
+---------+
|       4 |
+---------+

User Comments

When you select
max(date_format(col_name, "fstring"))
the maximum alphabetic string is returned, not
the maximum date. Need to create a temporary
table to get the max date, first, then select
again to format the date. Is this correct
behavior?

select max(col_name), date_format
(col_name, "fstring") group by col_name;

This is an add workaround, but it would work. This
would return the appropiate (most recent or
future) datetime value as the first item and its
formatted string as the second item. The biggest
loss would be performance, but not too much of it.

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