How can I select the row with the highest ID in MySQL?

SELECT MAX(id) FROM TABLENAME

This identifies the largest id and returns the value

Suppose you have mulitple record for same date or leave_type but different id and you want the maximum no of id for same date or leave_type as i also sucked with this issue, so Yes you can do it with the following query:

select * from tabel_name where employee_no='123' and id=(
   select max(id) from table_name where employee_no='123' and leave_type='5'
)

SELECT MAX(ID) FROM tablename LIMIT 1

Use this query to find the highest ID in the MySQL table.

Since both SELECT MAX(id) FROM table and SELECT id FROM table ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 0,1 fulfill the goal, the interesting part is, which performs better.

SELECT MAX(id) FROM table: 152ms
SELECT id FROM table ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 0,1: 25ms
(InnoDB-table with 55M rows on MySQL 8.0, 10 runs, average result)

Of course thats not representive, but gives an idea, that the ORDER BY method performs significantly better.

This is the only proposed method who actually selects the whole row, not only the max(id) field. It uses a subquery

SELECT * FROM permlog WHERE id = ( SELECT MAX( id ) FROM permlog )

SELECT * FROM `permlog` as one
RIGHT JOIN (SELECT MAX(id) as max_id FROM `permlog`) as two 
ON one.id = two.max_id