Question

I know that this must be a very basic question, but I’ve not found an answer.

As the title says, I would like the query the record that holds the max value of a specific column.

I use the following code to achieve that:

SELECT * FROM `table_name` ORDER BY `column_with_specific_max_value` DESC LIMIT 1

I would like to know if there is an other way to achieve the same result (more parsimonious)? I know that SQL has a function MAX(column) but it’s not working the way I want. I tried this:

SELECT * FROM `table_name` WHERE `column_with_specific_max_value`=MAX(`column_with_specific_max_value`)

and this:

SELECT *, MAX(`column_with_specific_max_value`) FROM `table_name`

What happen if the column_with_specific_max_value has 2 rows with the same max value? will it return both rows?

Answer 1

What about?

select * from table1
where score in (select max(score) from table1)

Or even without a max:

select * from table1
where score >= all (select score from table1)

Any of those WILL return all rows with the max value. You can play with it here.