Question

I have a database full of media. For simplicity sake, lets say it has

Table: media

id
college_id
title
shares

I’m trying to get the articles with the most amount of shares from each college. So, in essence, get the top shared article from Cornell, USC, Syracuse.

I have been using this SQL command, but it doesn’t return the most shared article from each college.

SELECT *
FROM media
GROUP BY college_id
ORDER BY shares DESC

Anyone have any ideas?

The shares column is an integer indicating the number of shares.

Answer 1

    SELECT top 1 * from media group by college_id order by shares desc

That was my first thought… though I’m wondering if I’m missing something since this answer is a lot simpler than Adam’s. If shares is the number of times it’s been shared though this sound like what you’re looking for.

Edit: I see now. Here’s another way…

    select m1.id, m1.college_id, m1.title, m1.shares
    from media m1 join
    (
        select college_id, max(shares) max_shares
        from media
        group by college_id

    ) m2 on m1.college_id = m2.college_id and m1.shares = m2.max_shares

This will return more than one article per college in cases where there is a tie. I don’t if you want that or not.