Get records with max value for each group of group

Question

How do you get the rows that contain the max value for each grouped set?

I've seen some overly-complicated variations on this question, and none with a good answer. I've tried to put together the simplest possible example:

Given a table like that below, with person, group, and age columns, how would you get the oldest person in each group? (A tie within a group should give the first alphabetical result)

Person | Group | Age
---
Bob  | 1     | 32  
Jill | 1     | 34  
Shawn| 1     | 42  
Jake | 2     | 29  
Paul | 2     | 36  
Laura| 2     | 39  

Desired result set:

Shawn | 1     | 42    
Laura | 2     | 39  

Answer 1

If ID(and all coulmns) is needed from mytable

SELECT
    *
FROM
    mytable
WHERE
    id NOT IN (
        SELECT
            A.id
        FROM
            mytable AS A
        JOIN mytable AS B ON A. GROUP = B. GROUP
        AND A.age < B.age
    )

Answer 2

This method has the benefit of allowing you to rank by a different column, and not trashing the other data. It's quite useful in a situation where you are trying to list orders with a column for items, listing the heaviest first.

Source: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/group-by-functions.html#function_group-concat

SELECT person, group,
    GROUP_CONCAT(
        DISTINCT age
        ORDER BY age DESC SEPARATOR ', follow up: '
    )
FROM sql_table
GROUP BY group;

Answer 3

My solution works only if you need retrieve only one column, however for my needs was the best solution found in terms of performance (it use only one single query!):

SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX(GROUP_CONCAT(column_x ORDER BY column_y),',',1) AS xyz,
   column_z
FROM table_name
GROUP BY column_z;

It use GROUP_CONCAT in order to create an ordered concat list and then I substring to only the first one.

Answer 4

let the table name be people

select O.*              -- > O for oldest table
from people O , people T
where O.grp = T.grp and 
O.Age = 
(select max(T.age) from people T where O.grp = T.grp
  group by T.grp)
group by O.grp; 

Answer 5

There's a super-simple way to do this in mysql:

select * 
from (select * from mytable order by `Group`, age desc, Person) x
group by `Group`

This works because in mysql you're allowed to not aggregate non-group-by columns, in which case mysql just returns the first row. The solution is to first order the data such that for each group the row you want is first, then group by the columns you want the value for.

You avoid complicated subqueries that try to find the max() etc, and also the problems of returning multiple rows when there are more than one with the same maximum value (as the other answers would do)

Note: This is a mysql-only solution. All other databases I know will throw an SQL syntax error with the message "non aggregated columns are not listed in the group by clause" or similar. Because this solution uses undocumented behavior, the more cautious may want to include a test to assert that it remains working should a future version of MySQL change this behavior.

Version 5.7 update:

Since version 5.7, the sql-mode setting includes ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY by default, so to make this work you must not have this option (edit the option file for the server to remove this setting).