How to select most frequent value in a column per each id group?

Question

I have a table in SQL that looks like this:

user_id | data1
0       | 6
0       | 6
0       | 6
0       | 1
0       | 1
0       | 2
1       | 5
1       | 5
1         


        

Answer 1

If you use proper "order by" then distinct on (user_id) make the same work because it takes 1.line from data partitioned by "user_id". DISTINCT ON is specialty of PostgreSQL.

select distinct on (user_id) user_id, most_frequent_value from (
SELECT user_id, data1 AS most_frequent_value, count(*) as _count
FROM my_table
GROUP BY user_id, data1) a
ORDER BY user_id, _count DESC 

Answer 2

You can use a window function to rank the userids based on their count of data1.

WITH cte AS (
SELECT 
    user_id 
  , data1
  , ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY user_id ORDER BY COUNT(data1) DESC) rn
FROM dbo.YourTable
GROUP BY
  user_id,
  data1)

SELECT
    user_id,
    data1
FROM cte WHERE rn = 1 

Answer 3

With postgres 9.4 or greater it is possible. You can use it like:

SELECT 
    user_id, MODE() WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY value) 
FROM  
    (VALUES (0,6), (0,6), (0, 6), (0,1),(0,1), (1,5), (1,5), (1,3), (1,3), (1,7)) 
    users (user_id, value)
GROUP BY user_id