Question

My problem is that I’m trying to count which tag has been used most in a table of user-submitted code. But the problem is with the database structure.

The current query I’m using is this:

SELECT tag1, COUNT(tag1) AS counttag 
FROM code 
GROUP BY tag1 
ORDER BY counttag DESC LIMIT 1

This is fine, except, it only counts the most often occurence of tag1 – and my database has 5 tags per post – so there’s columns tag1, tag2, tag3, tag4, tag5. How do I get the highest occurring tag value from all 5 columns in one query?

Jack

Answer 1

You should make 2-3 tables. I usually make 3:

code

• id
• code

code_tags:

• code_id
• tag_id

tags:

• id
• name

To make a query which shows the amount of tags used:

   SELECT t.*, COUNT(tag_id) as code_count 
     FROM code_tags ct 
LEFT JOIN tags t ON ct.tag_id = t.id 
 GROUP BY tag_id 
 ORDER BY code_count DESC 
    LIMIT 1