highlighting data values in a sql result set

I can think of a number of ways to do this in PHP or even JavaScript, but I'm wondering if there's a SQL-based technique I'm overlooking.

I have a database table, let's say 20 fields X 10 rows. I want to display the entire table on an web page, so I'd do something like SELCT * FROM data_table;, and then format the result set using HTML table tags.

However, I'd also like to highlight values in the table based on whether they are the maxi开发者_如何学Cmum or minimum value in their column. For example, I'd add bold tags around the max in each column. A resulting table might look something like this, with bold tags shown:

id |  field1  |  field2  |  field3  |  ...
0  |    5     |    2     | <b>7</b> |  ...
1  |    3     | <b>8</b> |    6     |  ...
2  | <b>9</b> |    5     |    1     |  ...
...

I could do a separate SELECT with an ORDER BY for each field and then interpret the results, but that seems like a lot of extra DB access.

My alternative right now is to just fetch the whole table, and then sort/search for the highlight values using PHP.

Is there a better way?

Its not pretty, but it will do exactly what you ask for:

SELECT
    (CASE field1
        WHEN (SELECT MAX(field1) FROM data_table)
        THEN CONCAT('<b>',field1,'</b>')
        ELSE field1
    END) as field1,
    (CASE field2
        WHEN (SELECT MAX(field2) FROM data_table)
        THEN CONCAT('<b>',field2,'</b>')
        ELSE field2
    END) as field2
FROM data_table 

...repeat for other columns

Best way I can think of:

$rowCount = 0;
$colorOne = '#ffffff';
$colorTwo = '#f3f3f3';

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
        $rowColor = ($rowCount % 2) ? $colorOne : $colorTwo; 
        echo "<tag bgcolor='$rowColor'></tag>";
$rowCount++;
}