SELECT whatever FROM table ORDER BY id DESC;

The results will be sorted in descending (or reverse) order. See http://www.mysql.com/doc/S/o/Sorting_rows.html for more information.

If things get any worse, I'll have to ask you to stop helping me.

... and adding

  LIMIT 5
[download]

to the end will with some database servers just give you the first five records of the result set.

 - ask

-- 
ask bjoern hansen, http://ask.netcetera.dk/   !try; do();

The LIMIT clause can be used to constrain the number of rows returned by the SELECT statement.
LIMIT takes one or two numeric arguments.
If two arguments are given, the first specifies the offset of the first row to return, the second specifies the maximum number of rows to return.
The offset of the initial row is 0 (not 1):

mysql> select * from table LIMIT 5,10; # Retrieve rows 6-15

If one argument is given, it indicates the maximum number of rows to return:

mysql> select * from table LIMIT 5; # Retrieve first 5 rows

In other words, LIMIT n is equivalent to LIMIT 0,n.

HTH

Anonymous monk,

I was doing this very thing yesterday for my final year project for my chemistry degree(A web-enabled chemical database of compounds which does all sorts of pretty things - alas in PHP not Perl but you can't have everything.)

select STUFF from TABLE order by INDEX/DATE desc limit 5;

Just replace STUFF with the column names you want, TABLE with the table name and INDEX/DATE with whatever you want to index it by (the desc tells it to do it in reverse order, sorting so that older dates end up last and newer ones first.)

"A nerd is someone who knows the difference between a compiled and an interpreted language, whereas a geek is a person who can explain it cogently over a couple of beers" - Elgon