mySQL query - show most popular item

Question

I need to find the most popular occurrence of an item grouped by date and display the total of all items along with the name of this item. Is something like this possible in a s

Answer 1

This is as close as I could get....

SELECT DISTINCT p.date, ItemTotalsByDate.Item, DateTotals.Total
    FROM test_popularity p
    INNER JOIN 
(SELECT date, MAX(cnt) DayMax from
(SELECT date, item, COUNT(*) cnt
FROM dbo.test_popularity
GROUP BY date, item) tbl
GROUP BY date) MaxesByDate
    ON p. date = MaxesByDate.date
INNER JOIN 
(SELECT date, item, COUNT(*) Total FROM dbo.test_popularity
GROUP BY date, item) ItemTotalsByDate
    ON MaxesByDate.date = ItemTotalsByDate.date AND MaxesByDate.DayMax = ItemTotalsByDate.Total
INNER JOIN
(SELECT date, COUNT(*) Total FROM dbo.test_popularity
GROUP BY date) DateTotals
ON p.date = DateTotals.date

The only thing this leaves for your PHP to do is only display the first result it finds for a given date. I couldn't figure out a good way to arbitrarily pick one item when it was a tie. Hope this helps.