Picking out the top recurring values

[Perloe]

Hi all,

I need help with something that seems like it should be really simple. I have a column with a bunch of numbers and I need a way to list the 5 numbers that appear the most number of times.

In other words, I have to somehow pick out the top 5 numbers that appear the most often. Is there a simple way to do this?

Thanks,
Steve

[glcarlstrom]

Don't know the exact syntax offhand, but play around with the SQL GROUP BY functions. Something like:

SELECT number, COUNT(number) AS num_count FROM tbl_name GROUP BY number ORDER BY num_count DESC LIMIT 5;

This adds an extra column to the result set, called num_count. For each number in the database, num_count will contain the number of times it appears; you can then ORDER BY num_count and retrieve however many results you need.

Just replace tbl_name with your table's name and number with the appropriate column name.

[Perloe]

Thanks for helping me out, but I'm afraid I'm still a bit confused. I tried your code, and it now keeps returning a value of 4 - I don't know where this value comes from. I'm not sure how to retrieve the results.