Finding the max and min date values in SQL Server tables - sql-server

Question

I have two tables:
A lookup table (tabOne):
KEY | Group | Name | Desc | Val_Key
----------------------------------------
1 | a | NameA | DescA | 10
2 | b | NameB | DescB | 20
3 | c | NameC | DescC | 30
4 | d | NameD | DescD | 40
5 | e | NameE | DescE | 50
6 | f | NameF | DescF | 60
A second table containing readings (tabTwo):
KEY | Date | Reading | Val_Key
----------------------------------------
1 | Date | Read | 10
2 | Date | Read | 20
3 | Date | Read | 40
4 | Date | Read | 40
5 | Date | Read | 30
6 | Date | Read | 20
7 | Date | Read | 40
8 | Date | Read | 20
9 | Date | Read | 10
10 | Date | Read | 20
11 | Date | Read | 50
12 | Date | Read | 60
What I need to do is join tabTwo with TabOne and create a column with the newest Reading and a column with the oldest reading for each item in the group column of TabOne.
At the end of the day I want a table that look as follow:
KEY | Group | Name | Desc | Val_Key | LastReading | FirstReading |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | a | NameA | DescA | 10 | | |
2 | b | NameB | DescB | 20 | | |
3 | c | NameC | DescC | 30 | | |
4 | d | NameD | DescD | 40 | | |
5 | e | NameE | DescE | 50 | | |
6 | f | NameF | DescF | 60 | | |
Thanks!
Freddie

Answer 1

If this is Sql Server 2005 or newer, outer apply will help:
select TabOne.*,
last.Reading LastReading,
first.Reading FirstReading
from TabOne
outer apply
(
select top 1
Reading
from TabTwo
where TabTwo.Val_Key = TabOne.val_Key
order by TabTwo.Date desc
) last
outer apply
(
select top 1
Reading
from TabTwo
where TabTwo.Val_Key = TabOne.val_Key
order by TabTwo.Date asc
) first
Live test is # Sql Fiddle.

Answer 2

#Nikola Markovinović's solution can be made more universally applicable if the subqueries are moved directly to the main query's SELECT clause, which is possible each of them retrieves only one value and is, therefore, valid as a scalar expression:
SELECT
t1.[KEY],
t1.[Group],
t1.Name,
t1.[Desc],
t1.Val_Key,
(
SELECT TOP 1 Reading
FROM TabTwo
WHERE Val_Key = t1.Val_Key
ORDER BY Date DESC
) AS LastReading,
(
SELECT TOP 1 Reading
FROM TabTwo
WHERE Val_Key = t1.Val_Key
ORDER BY Date ASC
) AS FirstReading
FROM TabOne t1
If you needed e.g. dates along the way, you would probably have to stick to Nikola's solution. There is an alternative to it, but it's more cumbersome (albeit more standard too): it would involve grouping TabTwo's data by Val_Key to get earliest/latest dates per Val_Key, then joining back to TabTwo to access entire rows corresponding to the found dates to finally pull the necessary columns, and ultimately joining both result sets to TabOne to get the final column set.