I love it when you don't know how to code something, so, before you cheat and use Google, you try what your instinct tells you ought to work and, low and behold, it does.

This doesn't happen with Notes as much as it does when I'm learning some other "new" technology. To me it's a sign of how good that technology is. If things work in a way that makes sense then it can't be bad.

It happens quite a lot with Flex, which I find very intuitive, but yesterday it happened with MySQL. Here's what happened:

I have a SQL table, called Hitlog, that records every hit on a document -- what time it was opened and by what user. It looks lie this:

What I needed to do was find out not only how many times a document had been read but also by how many people.

From the table above we can see that the document with the ID beginning in 857 has been read 7 times. Not by 7 different people though. Only 4 people have read it. Deandre read it 4 times herself. Maybe she's the author and is trying to make it appear more popular!?

What I needed to do was display on the document itself the following text:

This document has been read 7 times, by 4 different people.

I knew this was possible. I just wasn't sure how.

What's The SQL

It's simple to get the total number of reads, using SQL, like so:

This would simply return 7.

It's also simple to get a list of the people who've read it:

Which would return four rows -- one for each person.

What I wanted was a count of the number of these rows though. Also, what I really wanted to do was get both numbers returned from a single SQL statement.

What I didn't know you could do and what I tried as an intuitive solution was the following:

Et voila, it worked and I got that warm fuzzy feeling you get when you work something out yourself.