The PostgreSQL GROUP BY clause is used to divide rows returned by SELECT statement into different groups. The speciality of GROUP BY clause is that one can use Functions like SUM() to calculate the sum of items or COUNT() to get the total number of items in the groups.
Syntax:
SELECT
column_1,
column_2,
computing_function(column_3)
FROM
table_name
GROUP BY
column_1,
column_2;
It is important to note that The GROUP BY clause must exactly appear after the FROM or WHERE clause.
For the sake of this article we will be using the sample DVD rental database, which is explained here and can be downloaded by clicking on this link in our examples.
Example 1:
Here we will query for data from the payment table and group the result by customer id from the “payment” table of our sample database.
SELECT
customer_id
FROM
payment
GROUP BY
customer_id;
Output:
Example 2:
Here we will query to get the amount that each customer has paid till date and use an aggregate function (ie SUM()), to do so and group them by customer_id from the “payment” table of the sample database.
SELECT
customer_id,
SUM (amount)
FROM
payment
GROUP BY
customer_id;Output:
Example 3:
here we will make a query to count the number of payment transactions that each staff has been processing, you group the rows in the payment table based on staff_id and use the COUNT() function to get the number of transactions.
SELECT
staff_id,
COUNT (payment_id)
FROM
payment
GROUP BY
staff_id;Output:
