Question

I want to create hiscore list, but I have trouble doing it. This is my hiscore table and for every game I write user score into this table.

This is how my hiscore table look like:

id    user_id    user_name    score    entry_date
-----------------------------------------------------------
1      1         tom          500      2012-06-05 14:30:00
2      1         tom          500      2012-06-05 10:25:00
3      2         jim          300      2012-06-05 09:20:00
4      2         jim          500      2012-06-05 09:22:00
5      3         tony         650      2012-06-05 15:45:00

I want to get first 3 MAX scores, but I have to make sure if they have same score then I should take score that is first entered (based on entry_date column)

The query returned should be something like this.

1.  3      tony     650      2012-06-05 15:45:00     <- hi have to be first, because he have top score
2.  2      jim      500      2012-06-05 09:22:00     <- jim have the same score as tom, but he make that score before tom did so he is in second place
3.  1      tom      500      2012-06-05 10:25:00     <- tom have 2 entries with the same score, but we only take the one with smallest date

This is SQL query that I wrote but with that query i am getting hiscore list but it’s not ordered by entry_date and I don’t have any idea how to solve this problem.

SELECT TOP 3
    hiscore.user_id,
    hiscore.user_name,
    MAX(hiscore.score) AS max_score,
FROM
    hiscore
GROUP BY
    hiscore.user_id, hiscore.user_name
ORDER BY
    max_score DESC

UPDATE: Regarding score sum question

Regarding score sum, I need query that will return this when querying original hiscore table:

user_id   user_name    score
--------------------------------
1          Tom        1000
2          Jim         800
3          Tony        650

And if there are two users with the same score sum, user with better rank is the one with less entries in hiscore table.

Answer 1

Edit: this first query is a lie and won’t work! :), assuming sql 2005+ use the second one

Just add EntryDate to your order by

SELECT TOP 3 
    hiscore.user_id, 
    hiscore.user_name, 
    MAX(hiscore.score) AS max_score, 
FROM 
    hiscore 
GROUP BY 
    hiscore.user_id, hiscore.user_name 
ORDER BY 
    max_score DESC, entry_date DESC

Edit: ah I didn’t even see the group by – forget that, hang on a sec!

This one 😛

SELECT * FROM (SELECT
    hiscore.user_id,
    hiscore.user_name,
    hiscore.score,
    hiscore.entry_date,
    ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY User_id ORDER BY Score DESC, entry_date) as scoreNo
FROM 
    hiscore 
) as highs WHERE ScoreNo = 1 ORDER BY Score DESC, entry_date

assuming SQL 2005+

Edit:

In order to get the best scores ordered by score and then by number of entries the query is a bit simpler:

SELECT user_id, user_name, SUM(score) as Score from hiscore
GROUP BY user_id, user_name
ORDER BY sum(score) DESC, count(score) 

This will give you the scores ordered by the sum of ‘score’ descending, and then ordered by number of entries ascending which should give you what you want