Select Last Row in the Table

You never mentioned whether you are using Eloquent, Laravel's default ORM or not. In case you are, let's say you want to get the latest entry of a User table, by created_at, you probably could do as follow:

User::orderBy('created_at', 'desc')->first();

First it orders users by created_at field, descendingly, and then it takes the first record of the result.

That will return you an instance of the User object, not a collection. Of course, to make use of this alternative, you got to have an User model, extending Eloquent class. This may sound a bit confusing, but it's really easy to get started and ORM can be really helpful.

For more information, check out the official documentation which is pretty rich and well detailed.

You'll need to order by the same field you're ordering by now, but descending. As an example, if you have a time stamp when the upload was done called upload_time, you'd do something like this;

For Pre-Laravel 4

return DB::table('files')->order_by('upload_time', 'desc')->first();

For Laravel 4 and onwards

return DB::table('files')->orderBy('upload_time', 'desc')->first();

For Laravel 5.7 and onwards

return DB::table('files')->latest('upload_time')->first();

This will order the rows in the files table by upload time, descending order, and take the first one. This will be the latest uploaded file.

Use the latest scope provided by Laravel out of the box.

Model::latest()->first();

That way you're not retrieving all the records. A nicer shortcut to orderBy.