Question

I have a table which contains many records. I’m looking for an efficient way to count how many times an element is repeated.

Example table:

id     name
1      ana
2      john
3      tom
4      ana 
5      john

I’ve done so far , but it is inefficient.

$number  = 0;
for ($i =1 ; $i <= mysql_num_rows($query) ; $i++)
       for ($j = 1 ; $j <=mysql_num_rows($query); $j++)
           if ( $table[$i] == $table[$j])
                  $number++;
if ($number > 2 ) 
    echo $number;

Answer 1

You can do this directly in SQL

SELECT `name`, COUNT(*) AS `count`
FROM `table`
GROUP BY `name`

It will be more efficient, since you don’t have to transfer every row to PHP.