Learning SQL

Chapter 8. Grouping and Aggregates

Data is generally stored at the lowest level of granularity needed by any of a database's users; if Chuck in accounting needs to look at individual customer transactions, then there needs to be a table in the database that stores individual transactions. That doesn't mean, however, that all users must deal with the data as it is stored in the database. The focus of this chapter will be on how data can be grouped and aggregated to allow users to interact with data at some higher level of granularity than what is stored in the database.

Grouping Concepts

Sometimes, you will want to find trends in your data that will require the database server to cook the data a bit before you can generate the results you are looking for. For example, let's say that you are in charge of operations at the bank, and you would like to find out how many accounts are being opened by each bank teller. You could issue a simple query to look at the raw data:

mysql> SELECT open_emp_id
    -> FROM account;
+-------------+
| open_emp_id |
+-------------+
|           1 |
|           1 |
|           1 |
|           1 |
|           1 |
|           1 |
|           1 |
|           1 |
|          10 |
|          10 |
|          10 |
|          10 |
|          10 |
|          10 |
|          10 |
|          13 |
|          13 |
|          13 |
|          16 |
|          16 |
|          16 |
|          16 |
|          16 |
|          16 |
+-------------+
24 rows in set (0.01 sec)

With only 24 rows in the account table, it is relatively easy to see that four different employees opened accounts and that employee ID 16 has opened six accounts; however, if the bank has dozens of employees and thousands of accounts, ...