Question

I’ve got a table with these columns:

id | player1_name | player1_score | player2_name | player2_score | player3_name | player3_score | player4_name | player4_score | player5_name | player5_score

Given a single row, how do I get the highest playerX_score and the corresponding playerX_name?

I’ve tried using GREATEST(), but I can’t get the playerX_name.

Answer 1

As an aside, I think your table would be better designed as id | name | score | position | teamid, where position goes from 1 to 5 and teamid serves to group everyone in the same team together. It would make this sort of query much easier (greatest-score-per-team with associated rows).

However, here’s one way to do what you want with your current table:

SELECT GREATEST(player1_score,player2_score,player3_score,
                player4_score,player5_score) as score,
       CASE GREATEST(...) -- repeat the above
         WHEN player1_score then player1_name
         WHEN player2_score then player2_name
         WHEN player3_score then player3_name
         WHEN player4_score then player4_name
         WHEN player5_score then player5_name
       END as name
FROM mytable