4.2 — GROUP BY: The Game Changer

What You'll Learn

• How to use GROUP BY to group data in SQL
• How this compares to grouping rows in Excel PivotTables

Grouping Data in SQL

Here is the sales data we'll use in our examples:

Product	Amount	SaleDate
Apples	100	2024-05-01
Apples	50	2024-05-02
Oranges	80	2024-05-01
Oranges	40	2024-05-03
Bananas	60	2024-05-02
Bananas	30	2024-05-03
Pears	70	2024-05-01
Pears	30	2024-05-03

In Excel, you use PivotTables to group data by a column (like Product). In SQL, you use GROUP BY.

Example: Total sales by product

SELECT Product, SUM(Amount) AS Total_Sales
FROM sales
GROUP BY Product;

• Each product appears once, with its total sales.

Grouping by SaleDate

Example: Total sales per day

SELECT SaleDate, SUM(Amount) AS Total_Sales
FROM sales
GROUP BY SaleDate
ORDER BY SaleDate;

Key Points

• GROUP BY lets you summarize data by categories, just like PivotTable row labels.
• Every column in your SELECT (except aggregates) must be in the GROUP BY.

Next Steps

Next, you’ll learn how to group by multiple columns for more detailed summaries.