How to read the last row with SQL Server

If you're using MS SQL, you can try:

SELECT TOP 1 * FROM table_Name ORDER BY unique_column DESC 

select whatever,columns,you,want from mytable
 where mykey=(select max(mykey) from mytable);

You'll need some sort of uniquely identifying column in your table, like an auto-filling primary key or a datetime column (preferably the primary key). Then you can do this:

SELECT * FROM table_name ORDER BY unique_column DESC LIMIT 1

The ORDER BY column tells it to rearange the results according to that column's data, and the DESC tells it to reverse the results (thus putting the last one first). After that, the LIMIT 1 tells it to only pass back one row.

OFFSET and FETCH NEXT are a feature of SQL Server 2012 to achieve SQL paging while displaying results.

The OFFSET argument is used to decide the starting row to return rows from a result and FETCH argument is used to return a set of number of rows.

SELECT *
FROM table_name
ORDER BY unique_column desc
OFFSET 0 Row
FETCH NEXT 1 ROW ONLY

In order to retrieve the last row of a table for MS SQL database 2005, You can use the following query:

select top 1 column_name from table_name order by column_name desc; 

Note: To get the first row of the table for MS SQL database 2005, You can use the following query:

select top 1 column_name from table_name; 

Well I'm not getting the "last value" in a table, I'm getting the Last value per financial instrument. It's not the same but I guess it is relevant for some that are looking to look up on "how it is done now". I also used RowNumber() and CTE's and before that to simply take 1 and order by [column] desc. however we nolonger need to...

I am using SQL server 2017, we are recording all ticks on all exchanges globally, we have ~12 billion ticks a day, we store each Bid, ask, and trade including the volumes and the attributes of a tick (bid, ask, trade) of any of the given exchanges.

We have 253 types of ticks data for any given contract (mostly statistics) in that table, the last traded price is tick type=4 so, when we need to get the "last" of Price we use :

select distinct T.contractId,
LAST_VALUE(t.Price)over(partition by t.ContractId order by created ROWS BETWEEN CURRENT ROW AND UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING)
from [dbo].[Tick] as T
where T.TickType=4

You can see the execution plan on my dev system it executes quite efficient, executes in 4 sec while the exchange import ETL is pumping data into the table, there will be some locking slowing me down... that's just how live systems work.