Workaround for HQL SELECT TOP 1 in a subquery

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.