GROUP_CONCAT with limit

Question

I have table with player-s in many-to-many relation with skill-s

The goal is to list the players and their \"top 3 skills\" with a single q

Answer 1

One somewhat hacky way to do it is to post-process the result of GROUP_CONCAT:

substring_index(group_concat(s.title SEPARATOR ','), ',', 3) as skills

Of course this assumes that your skill names don't contain commas and that their amount is reasonably small.

fiddle

A feature request for GROUP_CONCAT to support an explicit LIMIT clause is unfortunately still not resolved.

UPDATE: As user Strawberry points out, the table player_skills should have the tuple (player_id, skill_id) as its primary key, otherwise the schema allows for the same skill to be assigned to a player multiple times, in which case group_concat would not work as expected.