Query -- select maximum salary in a sum table

[Tanu Gulati]

hi
I have an employee table with following fields
lastname,departmentID,salary
now i want to write a query on this table to get me the department id which gives maximum total salary to its employees. I wrote below query.

mysql> select sum(e1.salary), e1.departmentid from employee e1 group by e1.departmentid having sum(e1.salary) > 50000;

above query generates proper result when maximum sum salary of a department is > 50000 but as i wrote above i want to generate the department which gives maximum salary (i dont want to compare with 50000)

[Martin Vajsar]

I'd do the following:select sum(e1.salary), e1.departmentid from employee e1 group by e1.departmentid order by sum(e1.salary) desc; and then read just the first record returned. I assume this is possible in MySQL.

If you really do need to limit the result to one row (but why?), it should be possible too, but these mechanisms differ from database to database and I don't know the proper form for MySQL.

[Gabriel Jay]

A slight modification to the above query will return a single record:

SELECT sum(e1.salary), e1.departmentid FROM employee e1 GROUP BY e1.departmentid ORDER BY sum(e1.salary) DESC LIMIT 1;

[Sergey Mois]

select sum(e1.salary), e1.departmentid from employee e1 group by e1.departmentid having sum(e1.salary) >=
ALL(select sum(e1.salary) from employee e1 group by e1.departmentid)

[Tanu Gulati]

thanks Martin, Gabriel and Sergy for you quick responses!! I can understand why Coderanch is so popular discussion forum.