ROW_NUMBER() in MySQ

I want the row with the single highest col3 for each (col1, col2) pair.

That’s a groupwise maximum, one of the most commonly-asked SQL questions (since it seems like it should be easy, but actually it kind of isn’t).

I often plump for a null-self-join:

SELECT t0.col3
FROM table AS t0
LEFT JOIN table AS t1 ON t0.col1=t1.col1 AND t0.col2=t1.col2 AND t1.col3>t0.col3
WHERE t1.col1 IS NULL;

“Get the rows in the table for which no other row with matching col1,col2 has a higher col3.” (You will notice this and most other groupwise-maximum solutions will return multiple rows if more than one row has the same col1,col2,col3. If that’s a problem you may need some post-processing.)

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