Question

This is making me crazy! Musing MySQL DBMS (sorry not for specifying that)…

I have following table:

"id", "pingdate", "players"
"3","2012-05-24 11:45:04","63"
"1","2012-05-24 12:15:03","14"
"2","2012-05-24 12:15:03","38"
"3","2012-05-24 12:15:03","24"
"1","2012-05-24 12:45:04","22"
"2","2012-05-24 12:45:04","40"
"3","2012-05-24 12:45:04","66"
"1","2012-05-24 13:15:03","14"
"5","2012-05-24 13:15:03","99"
"3","2012-05-24 13:15:03","63"
"3","2012-05-24 13:15:03","38"
"4","2012-05-24 13:15:03","63"

I want following result:

"5","2012-05-24 13:15:03","99"
"3","2012-05-24 12:45:04","66"
"4","2012-05-24 13:15:03","63"

In text, i want 3 diffent ID´s, with highest players and the correct pingdate.

I have tried this, but it returns the wrong pingdate:

SELECT id, 
       pingdate, 
       max(players) AS players 
FROM pings 
GROUP BY id  
ORDER BY players DESC 
LIMIT 3

Answer 1

you have to do it with a join or subquery, see sql – getting the id from a row based on a group by

Select  a.id, a.pingdate, a.players from pings a, (
  SELECT id, max(players) AS players 
  FROM pings 
  GROUP BY id ) b 
where a.id=b.id and a.players=b.players 
ORDER BY players DESC 
LIMIT 3