select top 1 with a group by - sql-server

Question

I have two columns:
namecode name
050125 chris
050125 tof
050125 tof
050130 chris
050131 tof
I want to group by namecode, and return only the name with the most number of occurrences. In this instance, the result would be
050125 tof
050130 chris
050131 tof
This is with SQL Server 2000

Answer 1

I usually use ROW_NUMBER() to achieve this. Not sure how it performs against various data sets, but we haven't had any performance issues as a result of using ROW_NUMBER.
The PARTITION BY clause specifies which value to "group" the row numbers by, and the ORDER BY clause specifies how the records within each "group" should be sorted. So partition the data set by NameCode, and get all records with a Row Number of 1 (that is, the first record in each partition, ordered by the ORDER BY clause).
SELECT
i.NameCode,
i.Name
FROM
(
SELECT
RowNumber = ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY t.NameCode ORDER BY t.Name),
t.NameCode,
t.Name
FROM
MyTable t
) i
WHERE
i.RowNumber = 1;

Answer 2

select distinct namecode
, (
select top 1 name from
(
select namecode, name, count(*)
from myTable i
where i.namecode = o.namecode
group by namecode, name
order by count(*) desc
) x
) as name
from myTable o

Answer 3

SELECT max_table.namecode, count_table2.name
FROM
(SELECT namecode, MAX(count_name) AS max_count
FROM
(SELECT namecode, name, COUNT(name) AS count_name
FROM mytable
GROUP BY namecode, name) AS count_table1
GROUP BY namecode) AS max_table
INNER JOIN
(SELECT namecode, COUNT(name) AS count_name, name
FROM mytable
GROUP BY namecode, name) count_table2
ON max_table.namecode = count_table2.namecode AND
count_table2.count_name = max_table.max_count

Answer 4

I did not try but this should work,
select top 1 t2.* from (
select namecode, count(*) count from temp
group by namecode) t1 join temp t2 on t1.namecode = t2.namecode
order by t1.count desc

Answer 5

Here are to examples that you could use but the temp table use is more efficient than the view, but was done on a small data sample. You would want to check your own statistics.
--Creating A View
GO
CREATE VIEW StateStoreSales AS
SELECT t.state,t.stor_id,t.stor_name,SUM(s.qty) 'TotalSales'
,ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY t.state ORDER BY SUM(s.qty) DESC) AS 'Rank'
FROM [dbo].[sales] s
JOIN [dbo].[stores] t ON (s.stor_id = t.stor_id)
GROUP BY t.state,t.stor_id,t.stor_name
GO
SELECT * FROM StateStoreSales
WHERE Rank <= 1
ORDER BY TotalSales Desc
DROP VIEW StateStoreSales
---Using a Temp Table
SELECT t.state,t.stor_id,t.stor_name,SUM(s.qty) 'TotalSales'
,ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY t.state ORDER BY SUM(s.qty) DESC) AS 'Rank' INTO #TEMP
FROM [dbo].[sales] s
JOIN [dbo].[stores] t ON (s.stor_id = t.stor_id)
GROUP BY t.state,t.stor_id,t.stor_name
SELECT * FROM #TEMP
WHERE Rank <= 1
ORDER BY TotalSales Desc
DROP TABLE #TEMP