Advanced Selecting

[rapmonkey]

Say I have 20 fields in a table. Each row has a value of 1-100. How would I select only 10 fields (the ones with the greatest value)? 😕

[SanteeMatt]

well, if each ROW has a numerical value ranging from 1-100 like you said you can do something like:

select WHATEVER from TABLE-NAME order by COLUMN-NAME limit 10;

that would return 10 rows with the highest value for COLUMN-NAME.

im not sure if that is what you need, perhaps you should post some sample data and i could help more.

[Weedpacket]

Well, the database structure you're implying has put a slightly worried frown on my face - if you're needing to do that it suggests a conceptual failure somewhere along the line.

Since SELECTs return records, not fields, you'd probably be needing to return all 20 fields in the record and using PHP to locate the ten largest. The alternative would probably be some rather frightening and nasty MySQL-function mess.

On the off chance you mean records and not fields, that would just be a matter of adding "ORDER BY myfield DESC LIMIT 10" clauses to the end of the query.