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

manji's query does not handle tie-breakers for max feature. Here is my method, which I've tested:

;WITH WithClause AS (SELECT p.id, p.text, 
        (SELECT TOP 1 c.id from childs c 
            where c.parent = p.id order by c.feature desc) 
        AS BestChildID
    FROM Parents p) 
SELECT WithClause.id, WithClause.text, c.id, c.parent, c.feature
FROM WithClause 
LEFT JOIN childs c on WithClause.BestChildID = c.id