one-to-many query selecting all parents and single top child for each parent

Question

There are two SQL tables:

Parents:
+--+---------+
|id|   text  |
+--+---------+
| 1|  Blah   |
| 2|  Blah2  |
| 3|  Blah3  |
+--+---------+

Childs
+--+-----         


        

Answer 1

Using CTE (SQL Server 2005+):

WITH max_feature AS (
   SELECT c.id,
          c.parent,
          MAX(c.feature) 'feature'
     FROM CHILD c
 GROUP BY c.id, c.parent)
   SELECT p.id,
          p.text,
          mf.id,
          mf.parent,
          mf.feature
     FROM PARENT p
LEFT JOIN max_feature mf ON mf.parent = p.id

Non CTE equivalent:

   SELECT p.id,
          p.text,
          mf.id,
          mf.parent,
          mf.feature
     FROM PARENT p
LEFT JOIN (SELECT c.id,
                  c.parent,
                  MAX(c.feature) 'feature'
             FROM CHILD c
         GROUP BY c.id, c.parent) mf ON mf.parent = p.id

Your question lacks details for handling tie breakers (when 2+ CHILD.id values have the same feature value). Agent_9191's answer uses TOP 1, but that will take the first that is returned & not necessarily the one you want.