Question

I am currently using this MySQL query:

$query="SELECT user, COUNT(*) AS num FROM tracks GROUP BY user ORDER BY COUNT(*) DESC";

which gives me a unique row for each user with a count of the number of entries for each user in the table ‘tracks’.

Not all users have an entry in the table ‘tracks’ though, and I would like to select/list all users on a page. All users are however included in another MySQL table called ‘users’.

Because I would like to display all users sorted by the count of entries in the ‘tracks’ table (with users with no entries in the ‘tracks’ table at the bottom), I presume that I need to use one SELECT query to achieve this, but I am not sure how to do this, and would be glad of some help.

Answer 1

You need to do a left join. Assuming you have a “users” table with a “user_id” column which matches the “user” column in the “tracks” table:

SELECT users.user_id, count(tracks.user) from users left join tracks on (users.user_id = tracks.user) group by tracks.user order by count(tracks.user) DESC;