I need help with a query

[bibiki]

Hey there,
I need help with writing a query so I figured I'd ask here. Let me thank you in advance for your answer.

I need to see how often a value inside a certain column appears in a table. Say for example I have a table Person, that has a field name.

I want to know top five most frequently occuring names, along with the number indicating how often each appears.

Thank you.

[pritaeas]

Use COUNT, GROUP BY, and ORDER BY

[bibiki]

thanks for the help pritaeas,

this is what I am trying:

select name, count(name) frequency from (select name from person) order by frequency

and I am expeting:

someName|12
anOtName|7

but it is not working at all. hmm. can you please give some more hints?

[pritaeas]

SELECT `name`, COUNT(`name`) AS `frequency` 
FROM `person` 
GROUP BY `name` 
ORDER BY `frequency` DESC

This is tested on MySQL 5.5

[bibiki]

Hey pritaeas,
thank you very much for your help. sorry for late reply. That was helpful enought to get me through the block. thanks again.