Today we have a new MQL feature to announce: sort: count

We already had the ability to return a count of results:

[{
  "type" : "/astronomy/planet",
  "return" : "count"
}]

(The above will tell you how many planets we have in Freebase’s Astronomy Commons.)

And you can even find counts within a sub-part of the query, like, how many moons each planet has:

[{
  "type" : "/astronomy/planet",
  "/astronomy/orbital_relationship/orbited_by" : {
    "optional" : true,
    "return" : "count"
  }
}]

But what if you just wanted to know the planets with the most satellites? There’s no way to sort by that count that’s returned… until now!

[{
  "type" : "/astronomy/planet",
  "/astronomy/orbital_relationship/orbited_by" : {
    "return" : "count"
  },
  "sort" : "-/astronomy/orbital_relationship/orbited_by.count",
  "limit" : 3
}]

You can also use estimate-count for counts which are large and might otherwise time out.

Try it in the query editor!