GROUP BY and ORDER BY

I'm not very experienced with SPUFI and would like to know how I can get the following query to return in "location" order? It's supposed to total amounts for individual accounts within locations.

select distinct (account)
       ,location
       ,SUM(money)
   from table1
    where location = 'WHJ'
      AND money  > 500
    group by location, account

Thanks!


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This is a basic grouping query which requires only a little surgery to fix. You don't need the DISTINCT because that is a feature of how grouping works.

select location, account
     , sum(money)
  from table1
 where location = 'WHJ'
   and money > 500
group by location, account
order by location, account

One habit I have is to name the columns in the SELECT list and GROUP BY clause in the same sequence -- this simply makes it easier to verify (see note below) that all non-aggregate columns are included in the GROUP BY.

The other thing to note is that you should always include the ORDER BY if you need to have the results in a particular order. You will often get correctly sorted results without it, if it's the same sequence as the GROUP BY, simply because when the database needs to do a GROUP BY, it has to perform a sort. Nevertheless, it's always a good idea to include the ORDER BY clause if you need a specific order.

Finally, note that you do not really need to GROUP BY or ORDER BY location, since there's only one value in the result set. You can simplify your query to

select 'WHJ', account
     , sum(money)
  from table1
 where location = 'WHJ'
   and money > 500
group by account
order by account

Use this query if you always run it on one location at a time.

Note: Since you're using SPUFI (a mainframe query interface), you may appreciate the following humour. When I worked on mainframes, we used a special utility to do our syntax verification. It was called IEHIBALL. (Eyeball -- get it?)

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This was first published in April 2002

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