How can I display the most common value sequence in MySQL?

Question

Lets say I have a table like this.

A | B
-----
1 | 4
7 | 8
1 | 3
1 | 2
4 | 5
3 | 5
2 | 5
7 | 8

Even though 1 is the most common value in column A and 5 is the most common value in column B (which can be checked pretty simply with a COUNT()) the result I am looking for is the pair <7, 8> since that pair appears twice.

So how can I get the most common value sequence from a table, since I have n columns that I need to do this with.

Launalaunce

Are you saying that you're looking for the statistical mode of the tuple (A,B)? In other words the combination of A,B which appears most frequently? – Largish

Answer 1

select A, B, count(*) as freq
from MyTable
group by A, B
order by count(*) desc
limit 1

Baluchistan