max on sum?

Anon

I am running into a problem..(using mysql). I need to get the max of a sum..is this possible? something like select max(sum($killed)) from db. This doesn't work though.

Anon

let me state a bit more...

say i have a database that has earthquakes and the number of killed and year

so maybe it looks like this

year, type, country, killed

1980 Earthquake Afghanistan 20
1981 Earthquake Afghanistan 2
1981 Earthquake Afghanistan 10
1981 Earthquake Afghanistan 2
1985 Earthquake Afghanistan 3
1985 Earthquake Japan 30

or something like that. I am creating a bar chart, based on year. So I need to sum up the total for each year, and then get the MAX total for the sums, to create the maximum Y axis number. Does that make more sense? I can't figure out how to get the max of the sum.

tasistro

select country, sum(killed) as sum_killed from %earthquake_table_here% group by killed order by sum_killed desc

You'll get all the sums and the first row will also be the greatest (max)

Saludos
Gerardo

Anon

thanks, but that does not work. That only returns the max value of a single year(in the following example, it returns 4700).

year, killed
1998, 4700
1998, 2323
1991, 545
1982, 500

I need to get the value 7023, since that is the max value for a single year (4700 + 2323), because sometimes you have more than one earthquake in a year, but each are recorded as seperate events in the db.