Question

I’m trying to grab a user_id from my users tables that has the most referrals. Sorry for the vague title, I’m not sure what this is called.

Using PHP and MYSQL.

Example:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `users` (
  `user_id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `name` varchar(180) CHARACTER SET utf8 NOT NULL,
  `ip` varchar(180) CHARACTER SET utf8 NOT NULL,
  `registered` varchar(180) CHARACTER SET utf8 NOT NULL,
  `lastonline` varchar(180) CHARACTER SET utf8 NOT NULL,
  `referral` varchar(180) CHARACTER SET utf8 NOT NULL,
  `url` varchar(180) CHARACTER SET utf8 NOT NULL,
  `points` float NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`user_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM  DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=6544 ;

A user will look like this,

1, 'username', 'ipaddy', 'date', 'date', '**REFERRAL**', 'url', 13633

I’m trying to find the user_id that has the most of the same referral in all of the users tables. Lets say user 4 has 10 different users with the same thing in the referral varchar. How can i select see user 4 without going through every single user, logging their referrals, and then pick the one with the most.

There has to be an easier way…

Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

EDIT: Sorry, referral is the name of another user, not the user_id.

Answer 1

A little extra added to your SQL:

SELECT referral, count(*) AS count FROM users 
WHERE referral IS NOT NULL AND referral != ''
GROUP BY referral ORDER BY COUNT(referral) DESC