Parent child relationship questions

[Duncan Hill]

I have two related tables:

device_details
- device_id
- device_name
- device_type

device_events
- device_id
- event_type
- event_date

One to many relationship: device_id

I have two questions that I would like some advice on:

1. How should I insert records into the device_details & device_events? The first insert will require inserts into both tables but subsequent inserts will only insert into device_events. There needs to be some sort of 'if exists' condition on the device_details table.

2. I need to select all records from device_details along with only the last/most recent device_events record, then filter the results using event_type. What's the most efficient way to achieve this?

Thanks for any help, as can be seen my SQL skills is extremely limited.