Count the occurrences of DISTINCT values
Just changed Amber's COUNT(*) to COUNT(1) for the better performance.
SELECT name, COUNT(1) as count
FROM tablename
GROUP BY name
ORDER BY count DESC;
What about something like this:
SELECT
name,
count(*) AS num
FROM
your_table
GROUP BY
name
ORDER BY
count(*)
DESC
You are selecting the name and the number of times it appears, but grouping by name so each name is selected only once.
Finally, you order by the number of times in DESCending order, to have the most frequently appearing users come first.
SELECT name,COUNT(*) as count
FROM tablename
GROUP BY name
ORDER BY count DESC;