To get the most recent entries from your customer orders table, you’re on the right track thinking about using the ORDER BY clause. The general idea is to sort your results by the order_date field in descending order, which will give you the latest orders first. Then, you can use the LIMIT clause to restrict the output to just the number of records you want.

Here’s a basic example of what the SQL query could look like:

        
            SELECT order_id, customer_id, order_date, total_amount
            FROM orders
            ORDER BY order_date DESC
            LIMIT 10;
        
    

This query selects the last 10 orders made, sorted by order_date in descending order.

Regarding duplicates, if you want to ensure you’re only pulling unique records—like the most recent order from each customer—you might need to use a different approach. One way to get unique orders is by using a common table expression (CTE) or a subquery to find the latest orders for each customer.

For example, you could do something like this:

        
            WITH RecentOrders AS (
                SELECT *,
                       ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY customer_id ORDER BY order_date DESC) as rn
                FROM orders
            )
            SELECT order_id, customer_id, order_date, total_amount
            FROM RecentOrders
            WHERE rn = 1
            ORDER BY order_date DESC
            LIMIT 10;
        
    

This query uses a window function to rank the orders per customer by their order_date, then pulls just the latest one for each customer.

As for performance considerations with larger datasets, make sure your order_date field is indexed. Indexing can significantly speed up sorting and filtering operations, especially when you’re working with a lot of data.

Hope this helps clear things up! Dive into experimenting with these queries, and you’ll get the hang of it in no time!