Question

I have two columns:

INDEX     NAME
 125      john
 125      dave
 125      dave
 130      john
 131      dave

I want to return only the name with the most number of occurrences. Then I want to put the string into a variable. What’s a query that I can use to achieve this?

This is with SQL Server 2008 and C#

Answer 1

Try this, it may give you what you are looking for.

SELECT TOP 1 name 
  FROM names_table 
 GROUP BY name
 ORDER BY COUNT(1) DESC;

This is similar to what you tried originally. Just move the count() to the order by, rather than the select list.