7.2 The Row Holding the Maximum of a Certain Column

Task: Find the number, dealer, and price of the most expensive article.

This is easily done with a subquery:

SELECT article, dealer, price
FROM   shop
WHERE  price=(SELECT MAX(price) FROM shop);
+---------+--------+-------+
| article | dealer | price |
+---------+--------+-------+
|    0004 | D      | 19.95 |
+---------+--------+-------+

Another solution is to use a LEFT JOIN, as shown here:

SELECT s1.article, s1.dealer, s1.price
FROM shop s1
LEFT JOIN shop s2 ON s1.price < s2.price
WHERE s2.article IS NULL;

You can also do this by sorting all rows descending by price and get only the first row using the MySQL-specific LIMIT clause, like this:

SELECT article, dealer, price
FROM shop
ORDER BY price DESC
LIMIT 1;

Note

If there were several most expensive articles, each with a price of 19.95, the LIMIT solution would show only one of them.