You aggregated data into groups, but you want to sort the records in descending order by the number of elements in the groups. Our database has a table named Let’s create a report on our users. We’ll group the results by To sort the selected records by the number of the elements in each group, you use the The first step is to use the As usual, you can use both ascending or descending order with Here’s the
result: Subscribe to our newsletter Join our monthly newsletter to be Email address How Do You Write a SELECT Statement in SQL? What Is a Foreign Key in SQL? Enumerate and Explain All the Basic Elements of an SQL Query IntroductionOne of the most fundamental parts of working with databases is the practice of retrieving information about the data held within them. In relational database management systems, any operation used to retrieve information from a table is referred to as a query. In this guide, we will discuss the syntax of queries in Structured Query Language (SQL) as well as some of their more commonly used functions and operators. PrerequisitesIn order to follow this guide, you will need a computer running some type of relational database management system (RDBMS) that uses SQL. The instructions and examples in this guide were validated using the following environment:
Note: Please note that many RDBMSs use their own unique implementations of SQL. Although the commands outlined in this tutorial will work on most RDBMSs, the exact syntax or output may differ if you test them on a system other than MySQL.
Connecting to MySQL and Setting up a Sample DatabaseIf your SQL database system runs on a remote server, SSH into your server from your local machine:
Then open up the MySQL server prompt, replacing
From the prompt, create a database named
If the database was created successfully, you’ll receive output like this:
To select the
After selecting To follow along with the examples used in this guide, imagine that you run a public parks cleanup initiative in New York City. The program is made up of volunteers who commit to cleaning up a city park near their homes by regularly picking up litter. Upon joining the initiative, these volunteers each set a goal of how many trash bags of litter they’d like to pick up each week. You decide to store information about the volunteers’ goals in an SQL database with a table that has five columns:
Run the following
Then load the
With that, you’re ready to follow the rest of the guide and begin learning how to create queries in SQL. Required Query Components: the SELECT and FROM ClausesIn SQL, a statement is any operation sent to the database system that will perform some sort of task, like creating a table, inserting or deleting data, or changing the structure of a column or table. A query is an SQL statement that retrieves information about data held in a database. On its own, a query will not change any existing data held in a table. It will only return the information about the data which the author of the query explicitly requests. The information returned by a given query is referred to as its result set. Result sets typically consist of one or more columns from a specified table, and each column returned in a result set can hold one or more rows of information. Here’s the general syntax of an SQL query:
SQL statements are made up of various clauses, which consist of certain keywords and the information that these keywords require. At a minimum, SQL queries only require you to include two clauses: the Note: In this example syntax, both clauses are written on their own line. However, any SQL statement can alternatively be written on a single line, like this:
This guide will follow the common SQL style convention of separating statements onto multiple lines so each line contains only one clause. This aimed to make each example more readable and understandable, but be aware that as long as you don’t include any syntax errors you can write any query on a single line or on as many lines as you’d like. Every SQL query begins with a In SQL queries, the order of execution begins with the As an example, run the following query. This will retrieve the
Here’s this query’s result set:
Even though this operation looked at the entire You can retrieve information from
multiple columns by separating each one’s name with a comma, as in the following query. This will return the
Notice that this result set returns the There may be times when you want to retrieve every column from a table. Rather than
writing out the name of every column in your query, you can instead enter an asterisk ( The following query will return every column from the
Notice how this result set’s columns are listed in the same order in which they were defined in the Be aware that you can retrieve information from multiple tables in the same query with the Removing Duplicate Values with DISTINCTBy default, RDBMSs will return every value from a column returned by a query, including duplicate values. As an example, run the following query. This will return the values from the
Notice how this result set includes two duplicated values: The following query will return every unique value in the
This query’s result set has three fewer rows than that of the previous one, since it removed one of the Note that SQL treats every row of a result set as an individual record, and To illustrate this, issue the following query that includes the
The duplicate values in the Filtering Data with WHERE clausesThere may be times when you want to retrieve more granular information from
tables in your database. You can filter out certain rows by including a
Following the Predicates in a
After the Predicates always return a result of either “true,” “false,” or “unknown.” When running SQL queries that
contain a To illustrate this idea, run the following
Because
Because this search condition always returns a result of “true,” it isn’t very useful. You may as well not include a Rather than
comparing two literal values like this, you’ll typically use a column name as one of the value expressions in a The following query’s
Only one volunteer’s
You can also evaluate character string values in search condition predicates. The following query returns the
Because there’s only one volunteer named
To reiterate, this section’s examples all use the same search condition operator — the equals sign — to filter data. However, there are a number of other types of operators that allow you to write a variety of predicates, offering a high level of control over what information your queries return. The SQL standard defines 18 different types of predicates, though not all of them are supported on every RDBMS. Here are five of the most commonly used search condition predicate types and the operators they use: Comparison: Comparison predicates compare one value expression with another; in queries, it’s almost always the case that at least one of these value expressions is the name of a column. The six comparison operators are:
Null: Predicates that use the It’s beyond the scope of this tutorial to go into each of these predicate types in greater detail. If you’d like to learn more about them, though, we encourage you to check out the following guides:
To learn more about Sorting Query Results with ORDER BYSometimes queries will return information in ways that may not be intuitive, or may not suit your particular needs. You can sort query results by appending an Here’s the general syntax of a query with an
To illustrate how this works, say you wanted to know which of your volunteers has the highest
However, this query sorts the result set in the order in which each row was added:
For a relatively small data set like this, the
order of a result set isn’t that important and you could just scan this result set’s Instead, you could run the same query but add an
As this output indicates, the default behavior of SQL queries that include an
ConclusionBy reading this guide, you learned how to write basic queries, as well as filter and sort query result sets. While the commands shown here should work on most relational databases, be aware that every SQL database uses its own unique implementation of the language. You should consult your DBMS’s official documentation for a more complete description of each command and their full sets of options. If you’d like to learn more about working with SQL, we encourage you to check out the other tutorials in this series on How To Use SQL. Which SQL query will retrieve the number of donors?The COUNT function
To get that value from our donor table, you would run the following query: SELECT COUNT(*) FROM donors . This will return the total number of donors, which in this case is 6.
What is select COUNT in SQL?2. SQL SELECT COUNT(*) function. SQL SELECT statement can be used along with COUNT(*) function to count and display the data values. The COUNT(*) function represents the count of all rows present in the table (including the NULL and NON-NULL values).
What is the order of operations in SQL?Six Operations to Order: SELECT, FROM, WHERE, GROUP BY, HAVING, and ORDER BY.
What is the meaning of GROUP BY in SQL?The GROUP BY statement groups rows that have the same values into summary rows, like "find the number of customers in each country". The GROUP BY statement is often used with aggregate functions ( COUNT() , MAX() , MIN() , SUM() , AVG() ) to group the result-set by one or more columns.
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