Using the SQL date function to find aggregate totals by month
By Rudy Limeback, SQL Consultant, r937.com
SearchOracle.com
Let's propose a hypothetical example. I have several salespeople who sell widgets. In my DB the widget sales are listed by quantity sold per date by each salesperson. So, for example, Fred sells 2 widgets on 10/23/08 and John sells 5. Now on 10/24/08 Fred sells 14 and John sells 2. So on and so forth for a whole year. Each quantity is listed by date. But I want to group the dates together into months and then be able to see the widget sales by salesperson by month. How can I group the dates into months?
This is a straightforward application of GROUP BY with a date function.
The only real problem here is which date function you can use. Date functions actually precede the adoption of SQL Standards for temporal datatypes, so many database systems have their own, proprietary functions. In Standard SQL, the function you need here is EXTRACT.
SELECT EXTRACT(MONTH FROM salesdate) AS salesmonth
, salesperson
, SUM(salesqty) AS total_sales
FROM widget_sales
GROUP
BY EXTRACT(MONTH FROM salesdate)
, salesperson
ORDER
BY EXTRACT(MONTH FROM salesdate)
, total_sales DESC
This query will combine monthly sales for all years, if the table contains data for more than one year (although your question seems to suggest that it doesn't).
Notice that the ORDER BY clause sorts the results into months, and then within each month, by decreasing total sales.
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