Question

I have a user table with id, username and food_id columns. The idea is the users store their favourite food and we come up with a league table of foods. I want to generate a report of the top votes for the each food type. I am using MySQL and PHP.

For clarity, here is an example of the table:

 id  food_id   username
 1   1         Bob
 2   100       Jane
 3   200       Andy
 4   1         Maggy
 5   100       Rich
 6   100       Mick
 7   1         Kevin

I have a query that user ‘renegm’ on Stackoverflow gave me. It give me the results of the food survey. The query is:

select food_id, count(*) score
   from myTable
group by food_id
order by score desc limit 100

It gives me the results perfectly as in:

food_id   score
1         3
100       4

I realised after I got the answer that I am getting food_ids and not names.

I need to do a join on food table. It looks like

food_id    food_name
1          Salad
100        Burgers

How do I incorporate the join into the above query? I have looked at my books but can’t quite work it out.

Answer 1

select f.food_id,
       n.food_name,
       count(f.food_id) score
  from myTable
  left join food_names n 
         on n.food_id = f.food_id
group by f.food_id,
         n.food_name
order by score desc limit 100