Mysql Limit column value repetition N times - php

Question

I have two tables
Customer (idCustomer, ecc.. ecc..)
Comment (idCustomer, idComment, ecc.. ecc..)
obviously the two table are joined together, for example
SELECT * FROM Comment AS co
JOIN Customer AS cu ON cu.idCustomer = co.idCustomer
With this I select all comment from that table associated with is Customer, but now I wanna limit the number of Comment by 2 max Comment per Customer.
The first thing I see is to use GROUP BY cu.idCustomer but it limits only 1 Comment per Customer, but I wanna 2 Comment per Customer.
How can I achieve that?

Answer 1

One option in MySQL is server-side variables. For example:
set #num := 0, #customer := -1;
select *
from (
select idCustomer
, commentText
, #num := if(#customer = idCustomer, #num + 1, 1)
as row_number
, #customer := idCustomer
from Comments
order by
idCustomer, PostDate desc
) as co
join Customer cu
on co.idCustomer = cu.idCustomer
where co.row_number <= 2

Answer 2

This version doesn't require the SET operation:
select *
from (select idCustomer
, commentText
, #num := if(#customer = idCustomer, #num + 1, 1) as row_number
, #customer = idCustomer
from Comments
JOIN(SELECT #num := 0, #customer := 1) r
order by idCustomer, PostDate desc) as co
join Customer cu on co.idCustomer = cu.idCustomer
where co.row_number <= 2

Answer 3

SELECT * FROM Comments AS cm1
LEFT JOIN Comments AS cm2 ON cm1.idCustomer = cm2.idCustomer
LEFT JOIN Customer AS cu ON cm1.idCustomer = cu.idCustomer
WHERE cm1.idComment != cm2.idComment
GROUP BY cm1.idCustomer
However, if you are going to change the number of comments it's better to use Andomar's solution.

Answer 4

There is no need to use cursor, which is very slow. See my answer to Complicated SQL Query About Joining And Limitting. DENSE_RANK will do the trick without all cursor intricacies.

Answer 5

If you are using a scripting language such as PHP to process the results, you could limit the number of results shown per customer after running the query. Set up an array to hold all the results, set up another array to hold the number of results per customer and stop adding the query results to the result set after the count exceeds your limit like so:
$RESULTS = array();
$COUNTS = array();
$limit = 2;
$query = "SELECT customer_id, customer_name, customer_comment FROM customers ORDER BY RAND()";
$request = mysql_query($query);
while ($ROW = mysql_fetch_assoc($request))
{
$c = $ROW['customer_id'];
$n = $COUNTS[$c];
if ($n<$limit)
{
$RESULTS[] = $ROW;
$COUNTS[$c]++;
}
}
This guarantees only two comments per customer will be shown pulled randomly or however you want, the rest gets thrown out. Granted you are pulling ALL the results but this is (probably) faster than doing a complex join.