SQL Inner Join only one row based on filtered records

Question

I have the following tables

user

id	name
1	John
2	Jack
3	George

essay

id	date_submitted	user_id	project_id
1	2020-12-10	1	1
2	2020-05-01	2	2
3	2020-04-10	3	2

project_phase

id	project_id	date	phase
1	1	2020-01-01	early
2	1	2020-05-31	mid
3	1	2020-11-30	late
4	2	2020-01-01	early
5	2	2020-03-31	mid
6	2	2020-04-30	late

1 User submits only 1 essay in one project and I want to have a combined table which shows me the user and the phase at which the essay was submitted.

I'm trying to get the record with the MAX date from project_phase that is below the date_submitted

So using the above data I want to get

user	date_submitted	phase
John	2020-12-10	late
Jack	2020-05-01	late
George	2020-04-10	mid

so far I combined the tables with INNER JOIN but the following query returns duplicate records. I also tried ROW_NUMBER() and MAX() but I didn't structure it correctly to get the answer I'm looking for

SELECT
    U.name,
    E.date_submitted,
    P.phase
FROM
    essay E
INNER JOIN user U ON U.id = E.user_id
INNER JOIN project_phase P ON P.project_id = E.project_id and E.date <= P.date_submitted

Any help appreciated, thanks.

Answer 1

I would suggest a correlated subquery:

SELECT U.name, E.date_submitted,
       (SELECT P.phase
        FROM project_phase P
        WHERE P.project_id = E.project_id AND
              P.date <= E.date_submitted 
        ORDER BY p.date DESC
        LIMIT 1
       ) as phase
FROM essay E JOIN
     user U
     ON U.id = E.user_id;