GROUP BY as a way to pick the first row from a group of similar rows, is this correct, is there any

Posted by FipS on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by FipS
Published on 2010-04-05T15:49:05Z Indexed on 2010/04/05 16:33 UTC
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I have a table which stores test results like this:

user | score | time
-----+-------+------
aaa  | 90%   | 10:30
bbb  | 50%   | 9:15   ***
aaa  | 85%   | 10:15
aaa  | 90%   | 11:00  ***
...

What I need is to get the top 10 users:

user | score | time
-----+-------+------
aaa  | 90%   | 11:00
bbb  | 50%   | 9:15
...

I've come up with the following SELECT:

SELECT * FROM (SELECT user, score, time
               FROM tests_score
               ORDER BY user, score DESC, time DESC) t1
GROUP BY user
ORDER BY score DESC, time
LIMIT 10

It works fine but I'm not quite sure if my use of ORDER BY is the right way to pick the first row of each group of sorted records. Is there any better practice to achieve the same result? (I use MySQL 5)

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