The Row Holding the Maximum of a Certain Column
Task: Find the number, dealer, and price of the most expensive article.
This is easily done with a subquery:
SELECT article, dealer, price
FROM shop
WHERE price=(SELECT MAX(price) FROM shop);
Other solutions are to use a LEFT JOIN or to sort all rows descending by price and get only the first row using the MySQL-specific LIMIT clause:
SELECT s1.article, s1.dealer, s1.price
FROM shop s1
LEFT JOIN shop s2 ON s1.price < s2.price
WHERE s2.article IS NULL;
SELECT article, dealer, price
FROM shop ORDER BY price DESC
LIMIT 1;
Note
If there were several most expensive articles, each with a price of 19.95, the LIMIT solution would show only one of them.