I have a set of dates in my database and would like to only get the latest one or the one closest to the current date. I'm trying to come up with a way of doing it but had no luck. If any one could help I would appreciate it.
Sort by date with a limit of one? Hopefully you have an index on that field?
You can do this in ActiveRecord is
Room.find :first, :order => ‘created_at desc’
See http://ts.freelancing-gods.com/rdoc/classes/ThinkingSphinx/Search.html#M000071 for more about ordering search results, which is really what you want.
I don’t think the AR flavor I gave above is likely to work out of the box with the Sphinx #search method. However, you could probably just ignore the Sphinx part if you really just want the most recently-created record of your rooms table, and let AR retrieve it for you.