How to get last row in a table with SQL query?

select top(1) * from table_name order by id desc

I wrote an article that should help you with this: TOP 1 JOIN

I cannot tell exactly what you want though, so there might be an easier way.

Adjusting William's answer, I would suggest something of the sort:

DECLARE @intLastNumber int
 
SELECT @intLastNumber = MAX(person.number) FROM person
 
SELECT
  [C].[name],
  [P].[number]
FROM
  customer [C]
  INNER JOIN person [P]
    ON [C].[id] = [P].[id]
WHERE
  [P].[number] = @intLastNumber

If you have to perform the operation in one query, just perform another join like so:

SELECT
  [C].[name],
  [P].[number]
FROM
  customer [C]
  INNER JOIN person [P]
    ON [C].[id] = [P].[id]
  INNER JOIN
  (
    SELECT MAX(person.number) AS [LastNumber] FROM person
  ) [SQ]
    ON [P].[number] = [SQ].[LastNumber]

Something like the above would work as well. I haven't executed any of these, but I believe they should work.

How about the following:

select TOP 1 customer.name, person.number
from customer,person
where customer.id=person.id
ORDER BY customer.name DESC, person.number DESC

This will invert the order of the table (last customer.name and last person.number for that customer), and only return 1 row.

I would suggest studying SQL a little more and trying to understand each part of the SELECT statment in more detail because you clearly don't understand what it happening.

I'll try to break down the SELECT for you quickly.
This is the basic structure

SELECT [columns] FROM [tables] WHERE [whereclause]

So, [columns] is telling the query what information to put into each row. [tables] is telling the query where to get the data. [whereclause] is telling the query what data to get the information from.

So, here's what the SELECT statement is actually doing. You're saying, that each row will have two columns, customer.name and Last(person.number). This means that for any of the data it returns, each row will show the customer name and the last value in the person.number column. That will go in every row returned.

Then, you tell it to get the data from customer and person and return a row for each time that the id's match.

What you need to do is specify that you only want to return the one row, not every row.

Henry's suggestion won't work because you can't have aggregate functions in the where clause but if could be modified to something like:

SELECT customer.name, person.number
FROM customer, person
WHERE (customer.id=person.id AND
       person.number=(SELECT Last(person.number) FROM person))

Hows about something like:

SELECT customer.name, person.number as X
 FROM customer, person
 WHERE customer.id = person.id AND
   person.id = Max(person.id)

Please note: this is off the top of my head, may not work.