Question

The following is the simplest possible example, though any solution should be able to scale to however many n top results are needed:

Given a table like that below, with person, group, and age columns, how would you get the 2 oldest people in each group? (Ties within groups should not yield more results, but give the first 2 in alphabetical order)

+--------+-------+-----+
| Person | Group | Age |
+--------+-------+-----+
| Bob    | 1     | 32  |
| Jill   | 1     | 34  |
| Shawn  | 1     | 42  |
| Jake   | 2     | 29  |
| Paul   | 2     | 36  |
| Laura  | 2     | 39  |
+--------+-------+-----+

Desired result set:

+--------+-------+-----+
| Shawn  | 1     | 42  |
| Jill   | 1     | 34  |
| Laura  | 2     | 39  |
| Paul   | 2     | 36  |
+--------+-------+-----+

---

NOTE: This question builds on a previous one- Get records with max value for each group of grouped SQL results – for getting a single top row from each group, and which received a great MySQL-specific answer from @Bohemian:

select * 
from (select * from mytable order by `Group`, Age desc, Person) x
group by `Group`

Would love to be able to build off this, though I don’t see how.

Answer 1

Here is one way to do this, using UNION ALL (See SQL Fiddle with Demo). This works with two groups, if you have more than two groups, then you would need to specify the group number and add queries for each group:

(
  select *
  from mytable 
  where `group` = 1
  order by age desc
  LIMIT 2
)
UNION ALL
(
  select *
  from mytable 
  where `group` = 2
  order by age desc
  LIMIT 2
)

There are a variety of ways to do this, see this article to determine the best route for your situation:

http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2006/12/07/how-to-select-the-firstleastmax-row-per-group-in-sql/

Edit:

This might work for you too, it generates a row number for each record. Using an example from the link above this will return only those records with a row number of less than or equal to 2:

select person, `group`, age
from 
(
   select person, `group`, age,
      (@num:=if(@group = `group`, @num +1, if(@group := `group`, 1, 1))) row_number 
  from test t
  CROSS JOIN (select @num:=0, @group:=null) c
  order by `Group`, Age desc, person
) as x 
where x.row_number <= 2;

See Demo