Occurrence Of Number Set In MySQL

[Vitaminwater]

Good afternoon everyone!

I was racking my brain today trying to figure out how I could possible figure out the number of occurrence's everything in my database has. I DO NOT want to search for an item and have it tell me how many times it happens in a database.

I want to query an entire column and count how many times it see's , 'XXXXX' and 'YYYYY'. And then output the top 5 most used number sets.

Can anyone shed any light on this? Maybe with arrays? I'm not sure...

Thanks Alot!

 

[jpyc7]

I did not test these queries, but I think you want something like:

select count(*) as qty, col_name from table_name group by col_name order by qty desc;

Or maybe something like:
select count(distinct col_name) from table_name;