Question

I have a user table with id, username and food_id columns. The idea is the user stored their favorite food and we come up with a league table of foods and 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

How do I write the query to list the foods that have the most votes. I want to limit the result to x number, say top 100. In this case I want the result to be as follows:

food_id score
1 3
100 4

I hope the question is clear enough. The query is beyond me but I am sure it must be possible to do it using DISTINCT and COUNT in some way or other. Perhaps it’s sub queries?

Answer 1

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



SELECT F.food_name,
    COUNT(*) AS score
FROM myTable AS M 
    INNER JOIN food_table AS F
        ON F.food_id = M.food_id
GROUP BY F.food_name
ORDER BY score DESC limit 100