Selecting the most common value from relation - SQL statement

Question

I have a table within my database that has many records, some records share the same value for one of the columns. e.g.

|  id  |  name  |  software  |
______         


        

Answer 1

You can do it in many ways but the simplest way would be this

SELECT item  
FROM (SELECT item FROM your_table GROUP BY item ORDER BY COUNT(*) desc)  
WHERE ROWNUM<=1;

Answer 2

select top 1 software 
from your_table 
group by software
order by count(*) desc 

Answer 3

It depends if you want to use standard SQL or vendor specific extensions (another poster has a "top N" query which is not standard). A standard solution would be.

SELECT software, COUNT(1) 
FROM tablename
GROUP BY software
HAVING COUNT(1) = (
  SELECT MAX(sc) FROM (
    SELECT software, COUNT(1) sc
    FROM tablename
    GROUP BY software
  )
)

Note: this may return multiple rows if several pieces of software are tied for the most occurrences.