Question

How do you get the rows that contain the max value for each grouped set?

I’ve seen some overly-complicated variations on this question, and none with a good answer. I’ve tried to put together the simplest possible example:

Given a table like that below, with person, group, and age columns, how would you get the oldest person in each group? (A tie within a group should give the first alphabetical result)

Person | Group | Age
---
Bob  | 1     | 32  
Jill | 1     | 34  
Shawn| 1     | 42  
Jake | 2     | 29  
Paul | 2     | 36  
Laura| 2     | 39  

Desired result set:

Shawn | 1     | 42    
Laura | 2     | 39  

Answer 1

There’s a super-simple way to do this in mysql:

select * 
from (select * from mytable order by `Group`, age desc, Person) x
group by `Group`

This works because in mysql you’re allowed to not aggregate non-group-by columns, in which case mysql just returns the first row. The solution is to first order the data such that for each group the row you want is first, then group by the columns you want the value for.

You avoid complicated subqueries that try to find the max() etc, and also the problems of returning multiple rows when there are more than one with the same maximum value (as the other answers would do)

Note: This is a mysql-only solution. All other databases I know will throw an SQL syntax error with the message "non aggregated columns are not listed in the group by clause" or similar. Because this solution uses undocumented behavior, the more cautious may want to include a test to assert that it remains working should a future version of MySQL change this behavior.

Version 5.7 update:

Since version 5.7, the sql-mode setting includes ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY by default, so to make this work you must not have this option (edit the option file for the server to remove this setting).