July 2002
Beginner
424 pages
9h 30m
English
The preceding chapter described scalar functions, which operate on individual row values. This chapter introduces SQL’s aggregate functions, or set functions, which operate on a group of values to produce a single, summarizing value. You apply an aggregate to a set of rows, which may be:
All the rows in a table
Only those rows specified by a WHERE clause
Those rows created by a GROUP BY clause
No matter how many rows the set contains, an aggregate function returns a single statistic: a sum, minimum, or average, for example.
In this chapter, I’ll also cover the SELECT statement’s GROUP BY clause, which groups rows, and HAVING clause, which filters groups.
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