Select Multiple Book Titles that share the MIN(PRICE) value | MySQL

Question

I have found no other specific problem like this on here.

This is a single table query in MySQL. I have a 'book' table that holds the 'title' and 'price' columns. The problem is to find the minimum book price and display the titles with that minimum value. My problem is that I can only return one title but there is multiple titles with that minimum value. The title my code returns isn't even a valid one, but the first title in the table.

My current code is:

SELECT TITLE,
       MIN(PRICE) AS "PRICE"
FROM book;

Answer 1

You can find the title(s) of the books with the lowest price with a sub query.

SELECT TITLE
FROM   book
WHERE  PRICE = (SELECT MIN(PRICE)
                FROM   book); 

The query in your question is not valid standard SQL and would be rejected by most other RDBMSs.

MySQL does not raise an error ( yet - though this is coming ) but also doesn't guarantee any particular semantics of the result.

Answer 2

You can calculate the minimum price in one subquery, and then find all the books whose price matches that in an outer query.

SELECT a.title, a.price
FROM book AS a
JOIN (SELECT MIN(price) AS minprice
      FROM book) AS b
ON a.price = b.minprice

Another way to write it is:

SELECT titla, price
FROM book 
WHERE price = (SELECT MIN(price) FROM book)

Answer 3

First, create a view that holds the cheapest book (minimum price):

CREATE VIEW minPrice AS
           (SELECT MIN(price) AS price
            FROM book)

Second, join your table with this view like follows:

SELECT book.price, book.title
FROM book
    JOIN minPrice
        ON book.price=minPrice.price

Answer 4

If you are using subqueries like....

SELECT TITLE
FROM   book
WHERE  PRICE = (SELECT MIN(PRICE)
            FROM   book);

these are little slower if are working with a large database as there are two SELECT statements. It will work fine though...You can also go with-:

SELECT title FROM book
ORDER BY price ASC LIMIT 1;