Question

At the moment I am revising my sql. I wish to perform a query in a table of items, where I would like to get the cheapest sweets.

select min(cost)
from items
where name like '%sweets%' and seller_id
in (    
    select seller_id
    from items
    where name like '%sweets%')

The above result, returns the cheapest price.

Problem:

I would like to display the name of the sweets, for example it may be chocolate sweets or strawberry sweets, etc. but if i change the first line of the query to select name, min(cost) the following error is produced:

Column 'items.name' is invalid in the select list because it is not contained 
in either an aggregate function or the GROUP BY clause.

Now I am viewing MYSQL tutorials but I am working on sql server. It worked fine in the tutorial but not in my case

Answer 1

This will give you all fields in the cheapest row(s), not just cost:

SELECT *
FROM items
WHERE
    name LIKE '%sweets%'
    AND cost = (SELECT MIN(cost) FROM items WHERE name LIKE '%sweets%')

BTW, a suffix search LIKE %something will cause a full table scan (and correspondingly poor performance).