How to find latest record from a table in sql server?

Question

My EmployeeData table is shown below

Employee    Jobnum    city   state   Datetime       Action
--------------------------------------------------------------------------    
Tom          123       mon    La     2014-04-14       U
Tom          123       mon    La     2014-04-14      D
Tom          123       mon    La     2014-04-13      D
Tom          124       tue    ca     2014-04-14      U
Tom          124       tue    ca     2014-04-14       I
Jerry        143       hr     NY     2014-04-14       D
Jerry        143       hr     NY     2014-04-14       I
Jerry        143       hr     NY     2014-04-14      I

When I query that table, I need to get the last records for each employee.

The output should look like

Employee    Jobnum    city   state   Datetime  Action
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tom          123       mon    La     2014-04-14     D
Tom          124       tue    ca     2014-04-14      I
Jerry        143       hr     NY     2014-04-14       I

Answer 1

SELECT Employee,Jobnum,city ,[state], [Datetime], [Action]
FROM (
select Employee,Jobnum,city ,[state], [Datetime], [Action]
       ,ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY Employee,Jobnum ORDER BY [Datetime] DESC) AS rn
from  EmployeeData
) Sub
WHERE rn = 1

Note

Avoid using Sql Server Key words for your column names, if you do have any column names which are key words in sql server use square brackets [] around them.

Answer 2

Try this once

select ed.* 
from Employeedata ed
inner join
(
select jobnum,max(datetime) as maxdate
from Employeedata
group by jobnum
 ) X 
on ed.DATETIME = X.maxdate
and ed.jobnum = X.jobnum
order by ed.jobnum;

Demo fiddle here http://sqlfiddle.com/#!3/aa528/12