Paranoid – yeah, maybe, I’ll take it as a compliment. Especially when mysql crashes doing inserts on a 400 GB database using myisam tables… Not my storage engine of choice either.

Also, keep in mind, I started down on mysql road with all the enthusiasm, which also happened to lose it bit by bit dealing with its crapness on daily basis.

I understand the frustration when you have the superior product, but can’t get people to switch. We supper the same with Javeline PlatForm.

That remembers me about the censorship.

Oh wait, I forgot, this piece of crap dbms doesn’t know about top-n queries, among other things missing like data integrity features, minus operation, real trigger support (without memory leaks), stored procedures that are using the query cache….etc.

On short, the solution is to use PostgreSQL.

SELECT @a:=IF(@b=Continent, @a+1, 0) AS a, Name, @b:=Continent AS Continent FROM Country ORDER BY Continent, Country

If the query does not scale well on a large database and you can control the output (limiting the number of countries), try this:
SELECT Name, GROUP_CONCAT(DISTINCT Name order by Name ASC SEPARATOR ‘, ‘) AS Countries FROM Country GROUP BY continent;

Note that it cannot limit the number of countries per line. Perhaps this can be a feature in a future version of mySql?

-David

your solution looks like it’s actually “any 5″

there are several ways to do it, depending on what you really mean

Bill: That looks like a nice solution. You do get a huge resultset which has to be filtered with a HAVING, so I’m not sure if it scales better.

Jeff: I don’t know how it scales. I might run some benchmarks this weekend (if I manage to stay away from hangovers). If you want to benchmark it, please do.

SELECT c.state, c.city_name, c.population
FROM cities AS c
LEFT JOIN cities AS c2 ON c.state = c2.state
AND c.population <= c2.population
GROUP BY c.state, c.city_name, c.population
HAVING COUNT(*) <= 3
ORDER BY c.state, c.population DESC;