Question

I have this table with thousands of rows:

id  |  Keyword  |  hits
1      cat         3
2      cats        5
3      castle      1
4      cream       2
5      car         12
.      .           .

I want to select the 3 rows with most hits and then order alphabetically.
So I want to return:

car
cat
cats

I have this:

SELECT keyword,hits FROM table ORDER BY hits DESC, keyword ASC LIMIT 3

but it only orders by hits and then if hits are equal it orders alphabetically.

Answer 1

Wrap your SELECT – that gets only the 3 rows with highest hits – as a subquery inside another query that orders by the keyword:

SELECT *                    --- or just: SELECT keyword
FROM
  ( SELECT keyword, hits 
    FROM table 
    ORDER BY hits DESC
           , keyword ASC    --- this is needed only in case of ties at 3rd place
    LIMIT 3
  ) tmp
ORDER BY keyword