How To Group/list Top 3 Of Each Category W/o Using Union?

Hello,

So my table contains say 100,000 records, and I need to group the
categories in fld1 by the highest count of subcategories. Say fld1
contains categories A, B, C, D, E.

All of these categories contain subcategories AA, AB, AC, AD,...AJ, BA,
BB...BJ, CA, CB, CC...CJ, etc in fld2.

I am counting how many subcategories are listed for each category. Like
A may contain 5 of AA, 7 of AB, 3 of AC, 11 of AD...1 for the rest and
20 of AJ. B may contain 2 of BA, 11 of BB, 7 of BC, and 1 for the rest.
I want to pick up the top 3 subcategory counts for each category. Would
look like this:

Cat SubCat Count
A AJ 20
A AD 11
A AB 7
B BB 11
B BC 7
B BA 2

So event though each category contains 10 subcategories, I only want to
list the top 3 categories with the highest counts as above. If I just
do a group by and sort I can get this:

Cat SubCat Count
A ... ...
A
A
A
A
A
A
...
B ... ...
B
B
B
B
B
...

But I just want the top 3 of each category. The only way I can think of
to do this is to query each category individually and Select Top 3, and
then Union these guys into one query. The problem is that I have to
hardcode each category in the Union query. There may be new categoris
that I miss. Is there a way to achieve what I want without using Union?

Thanks,
Rich

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