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mysqldatetimecountpopularity

MySQL: Getting "busiest" or "most popular" hour from a datetime field?

Consider the following table which has the fields - id (int) and date_created (datetime):

id       date_created

 1       2010-02-25 12:25:32
 2       2010-02-26 13:40:37
 3       2010-03-01 12:02:22
 4       2010-03-01 12:10:23
 5       2010-03-02 10:10:09
 6       2010-03-03 12:45:03

I want to know the busiest/most popular hour of the day for this set of data. In this example, the result I'm looking for would be 12.

Ideas?

Solution

  • I like both Simon and Peter's answers, but I can't select both as accepted. I combined the 2 to make a cleaner query that only returned the popular hour (I don't need the counts).

    SELECT hour(date_created) AS h 
FROM my_table 
GROUP BY h 
ORDER BY count(*) DESC 
LIMIT 1