The following is the simplest possible example, though any solution should be able to scale to however many n top results are needed:

Given a table like that below, with person, group, and age columns, how would you **get the 2 oldest people in each group?** (Ties within groups should not yield more results, but give the first 2 in alphabetical order)
&lt;pre&gt;
+--------+-------+-----+
| Person | Group | Age |
+--------+-------+-----+
| Bob    | 1     | 32  |
| Jill   | 1     | 34  |
| Shawn  | 1     | 42  |
| Jake   | 2     | 29  |
| Paul   | 2     | 36  |
| Laura  | 2     | 39  |
+--------+-------+-----+
&lt;/pre&gt;

Desired result set:  

&lt;pre&gt;
+--------+-------+-----+
| Shawn  | 1     | 42  |
| Jill   | 1     | 34  |
| Laura  | 2     | 39  |
| Paul   | 2     | 36  |
+--------+-------+-----+
&lt;/pre&gt;

---
**NOTE:** This question builds on a previous one- [Get records with max value for each group of grouped SQL results](https://stackoverflow.com/q/12102200/165673) - for getting a single top row from each group, and which received a great MySQL-specific answer from @Bohemian:

    select * 
    from (select * from mytable order by `Group`, Age desc, Person) x
    group by `Group`

Would love to be able to build off this, though I don&#39;t see how.

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Get top n records for each group of grouped results