[ILUG] OT: SQL query problem.....

[Glen Gray]

I have a bit of a problem at work. I have an Oracle table that acts as a
message queue for part of a project I've been working on. I'm having a
bit of trouble with what I thought would have been a simple SQL query.

Basically I need to be able to grab the last n amount of records. Or to
put it another way, given a record's key, I need to retrieve the
previous n records, where n is the number of records I want (obvious I
know).

So any ideas. I need it as basic SQL like "select * from table where
recordkey=124".

I've tried various attempts, the best way I could think of was to limit
the rownum to <=n and reverse the order. But the ordering only works
after result has been created.

e.g.

select 
	* 
from 
	record_table 
where 
	recordid < (select max(recordid) from record_table) 
and	rownum<=10
order by 
	recordid desc

I'd appreciate any help or tips.

Cheers

Glen