[Q] Does the VB database keep track of "Most Recent Threads" not "posts"

[downloadsuk]

Hi,

I'm doing some modding of my forum home page - as I'm modding the forum to be a Q&A site, I want to be able to have the forum home page list the most recent "questions" (i.e. the most recent topics / threads that have been opened) AND NOT the most recent posts.

Short of doing a query on the whole database, is there a list I can pull back of most recent threads or would I have to mysql (this is pseudo code here)

SELECT ( first 20 of) threads FROM thread.table WHERE thread.start <= today

?

I mean, if I did it this way, surely I'd have to bring back every single thread, sort it by date, and then do some post processing in PHP to pick out the first 20 from the list. If my forum gets big, this is a hefty query to be doing. And if posts dates stretch across multiple months, I don't really want to have to do a qualifying cut-off like (less than 30 days).

Can anyone help me out here? Maybe with the appropriate SQL query or even some ideas about the way the vb database stores the thread meta information?