Querying MySQL database for unique counts of column values

Question

I have a table structure that is similar to the following:

Table: poll_answers

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| LONG id | LONG question_id | LONG user_id | TEXT answer      |
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Users' answers to a poll gets stored into the database as such. poll_answer is a string and many answers by different users can be the same.

I would like to query the database to list the number of each unique poll_answer.

Example of a poll question with id 123 may be:

What month was xyz born in?

The database might look like this:

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| LONG id | LONG question_id | LONG user_id | TEXT answer      |
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| 0       | 123              | 1000         | monday           |
| 1       | 123              | 1001         | tuesday          |
| 2       | 123              | 1003         | monday           |
| 3       | 123              | 1002         | monday           |
| 4       | 123              | 1004         | thursday         |
| 5       | 123              | 1025         | monday           |
----------------------------------------------------------------

How can I query the database such that I get a list like this:

monday => 4
tuesday => 1
thursday => 1

The only one I can think of uses n number of queries where n is the number of different possible poll_answer.

SELECT UNIQUE answer FROM poll_answers

For each of the result,

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM poll_answers where answer = {the_answer}

Is there a more efficient way?

EDIT:

As a bonus, I would also like to know if efficiency-wise, it would be a good practice to generate and store a hash (MD5) of answer in the table and group by the hash instead.

Answer 1

If you need to get answers for ALL questions then try to use this query. It also orders answers for each query by popularity :

SELECT question_id,
       answer,
       COUNT(*) as answerCount
   FROM poll_answers
   GROUP BY question_id, answer 
   ORDER BY question_id, answerCount DESC

SQLFiddle demo

Answer 2

try this:

SELECT answer,COUNT(*) as uniqans FROM poll_answers group by answer