How can I SELECT rows with MAX(Column value), PARTITION by another column in MYSQL?

Question

I have a table of player performance:

CREATE TABLE TopTen (
  id INT UNSIGNED PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT,
  home INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
  `datetime`DATETIME NOT NULL,
  player VARCHAR(6) NOT NULL,
  resource INT NOT NULL
);

What query will return the rows for each distinct home holding its maximum value of datetime? In other words, how can I filter by the maximum datetime (grouped by home) and still include other non-grouped, non-aggregate columns (such as player) in the result?

For this sample data:

INSERT INTO TopTen
  (id, home, `datetime`, player, resource)
VALUES
  (1, 10, '04/03/2009', 'john', 399),
  (2, 11, '04/03/2009', 'juliet', 244),
  (5, 12, '04/03/2009', 'borat', 555),
  (3, 10, '03/03/2009', 'john', 300),
  (4, 11, '03/03/2009', 'juliet', 200),
  (6, 12, '03/03/2009', 'borat', 500),
  (7, 13, '24/12/2008', 'borat', 600),
  (8, 13, '01/01/2009', 'borat', 700)
;

the result should be:

id	home	datetime	player	resource
1	10	04/03/2009	john	399
2	11	04/03/2009	juliet	244
5	12	04/03/2009	borat	555
8	13	01/01/2009	borat	700

I tried a subquery getting the maximum datetime for each home:

-- 1 ..by the MySQL manual: 

SELECT DISTINCT
  home,
  id,
  datetime AS dt,
  player,
  resource
FROM TopTen t1
WHERE `datetime` = (SELECT
  MAX(t2.datetime)
FROM TopTen t2
GROUP BY home)
GROUP BY `datetime`
ORDER BY `datetime` DESC

The result-set has 130 rows although database holds 187, indicating the result includes some duplicates of home.

Then I tried joining to a subquery that gets the maximum datetime for each row id:

-- 2 ..join

SELECT
  s1.id,
  s1.home,
  s1.datetime,
  s1.player,
  s1.resource
FROM TopTen s1
JOIN (SELECT
  id,
  MAX(`datetime`) AS dt
FROM TopTen
GROUP BY id) AS s2
  ON s1.id = s2.id
ORDER BY `datetime`

Nope. Gives all the records.

I tried various exotic queries, each with various results, but nothing that got me any closer to solving this problem.

Answer 1

You are so close! All you need to do is select BOTH the home and its max date time, then join back to the topten table on BOTH fields:

SELECT tt.*
FROM topten tt
INNER JOIN
    (SELECT home, MAX(datetime) AS MaxDateTime
    FROM topten
    GROUP BY home) groupedtt 
ON tt.home = groupedtt.home 
AND tt.datetime = groupedtt.MaxDateTime