SQL Group By with an Order By

Question

There is a table which has tags and I want to get the maximum count of tags from the list.

Sample data looks like this

id (1) tag ('hello')
id (2) tag ('great')
id (3) tag ('hello')

using

SELECT COUNT(*), `Tag` from `images-tags`
GROUP BY `Tag`

This code is giving me the data I'm looking for but I want to organize it in such a way that the highest tag counts are first, and limit it to only the first 20

Answer 1

In any version of MySQL, you can use the aggregate in the SELECT list, and use ORDER BY and LIMIT the number of records :

SELECT COUNT(id) AS theCount, `Tag` from `images-tags`
GROUP BY `Tag`
ORDER BY theCount DESC
LIMIT 20

You were missing the ORDER BY statement which caused the error.