mySQL - get 2 most common items

Question

Hi I have a table called items which looks as follow:

items table

itemname | itemprice
---------------------
orange   | 0.50
pear     | 0.40
apple    | 0.40
banana   | 0.75

I also have a table that records each sale:

sales table

date     | itemname | qty
---------------------
17/12/13 | orange   | 4
22/12/13 | banana   | 6
23/12/13 | banana   | 2
29/12/13 | pear     | 3
02/01/14 | orange   | 2
05/01/14 | pear     | 6
05/01/14 | banana   | 5
06/01/14 | apple    | 2

What I want to do is get the itemname and price of the 2 most sold items. So the query should return:

itemname | itemprice
---------------------
banana   | 0.70
pear     | 0.40

I can get the 2 most common items but that is wrong as the qty needs to be taken into account and not the frequency of the itemname in the sales table.

Answer 1

SELECT i.itemname, i.itemprice
FROM items i
JOIN sales s ON i.itemname = s.itemname
GROUP BY s.itemname
ORDER BY SUM(s.qty) DESC
LIMIT 2

SQL Fiddle

If you want to be ANSI-compliant, change the GROUP BY to

GROUP BY i.itemname, i.itemprice