Question

I’m trying to get an ID from a table based on which ID has the least entries using only a single query. Is it possible to do that in just one query?

For example:

----------------------
|   ID   | Article_ID|
----------------------
|    1   |      7    |
----------------------
|    1   |      3    |
----------------------
|    1   |      4    |
----------------------
|    2   |      5    |
----------------------

I would want it to return “2” for the ID “2” because it only has 1 count versus ID 1 which has 3 count.

I know that I could accomplish this by first running a query to get a list of all of the IDs and then doing a loop to get each IDs count and then finally comparing them but I wanted to know if it was possible to do all of this in a single query instead.

Answer 1

Read the first row from the following cursor:

select id from (
  select id, count(id) as c 
    from <table name> group by id 
) as x order by c limit 1