Workaround for HQL SELECT TOP 1 in a subquery
- Written by Boris Drajer
- Published in NHibernate
HQL doesn’t seem to support clauses like “SELECT TOP N…”, which can cause headaches when for example you need to get the data for the newest record from a table. One way to resolve this would be to do something like “SELECT * FROM X WHERE ID in (SELECT ID FROM X WHERE Date IN (SELECT MAX(Date) FROM X))”, a doubly nested query which looks complicated even in this simple example and gets out of control when query conditions need to be more complex.
What is the alternative? Use EXISTS – as in “a newer record doesn’t exist”. It still looks a bit ugly but at least it’s manageable. The above query would then look like this: “SELECT * FROM X AS X1 WHERE NOT EXISTS(SELECT * FROM X AS X2 WHERE X2.Date > X1.Date)”
Note that this works only for “SELECT TOP 1”. For a greater number there doesn’t seem to be a solution at all.