COUNT() question

Hello,
>
I need to write a SELECT statement that will display the most popular
categories.
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This means I need a 'category count' for each of the messages in the
messages table, and I don't know how to do this.
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Here is the structure of the 2 tables:
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messages table
id, title, message, category, thread, status, date_posted
>
categories table
id, title, sub_cat
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I've tried the following:
select categories.id, categories.title, count(messages.category) as
count from messages, categories group by categories.title;
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but 'count' only returns the total count of messages with a category
entry, and I need the number of times each category id is entered in
the messages table.
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Any help is greatly appreciated. Also, does anyone have any online
references for learning more complex SQL statements?

Thanks,
Aaron

use group by messages.category instead of categories.title
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select c.id, c.title, count(m.category) as cnt from messages m
left join categories c
on c.id=m.category
group by m.category
order by cnt desc
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begin to look, and I just want to write the most effecient SQL commands
so my code is clean and I can minimize server-side logic.

>
Thanks,
Aaron
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