Compare date from php and MSSQL to retrieve the nearest date from now

Question

I want to compare MMSQL date together and i want to retrieve the nearest date from now.

Here is a sample of my mssql date data : 2013-01-23 09:34:03.000

My table is like this:

NAME : myTable
 Column:
 - nameUpdate (VARCHAR(255))
  - date (DATETIME)

Here is what i've done so far but it won't work.

$query = "SELECT date FROM myTable";
$res_mnem = mssql_query($query) or die(mssql_get_last_message() . "[ " . $query . " ]");  
        $latestDate = "";    
        if (!mssql_num_rows($query)) {

             while ($row = mssql_fetch_array($res_mnem)) {
                if($latestDate == ""){
                  $latestDate = $row["date"];
                }
                elseif($row["date"] > $latestDate){
                   $latestDate = $row["date"];
        }
            }

      }
    echo $latestDate;

Thanks to all

Answer 1

SELECT TOP 1 DATEDIFF(s, [date], GetDate())
FROM myTable
ORDER BY DATEDIFF(s, [date], GetDate())

This does a date substraction between Current (GETDATE()) and [date] in your table, on seconds (you could do it at a lower granularity than seconds, if you need to). It orders by the same datediff, in ascending order. The top 1 selects only the first record--that's the record that is the closest to the current date because of the ORDER BY.