SQL GROUP BY

Now we return to the aggregate functions. Remember we used the SUM keyword to calculate the total sales for all stores? What if we want to calculate the total sales for each store? Well, we need to do two things: First, we need to make sure we select the store name as well as total sales. Second, we need to make sure that all the sales figures are grouped by stores. The corresponding SQL syntax is,

SELECT "column_name1", SUM("column_name2")
FROM "table_name"
GROUP BY "column_name1"

Let's illustrate using the following table,

Table Store_Information 

We want to find total sales for each store. To do so, we would key in,

SELECT store_name, SUM(Sales)
FROM Store_Information
GROUP BY store_name

Result:

store_name SUM(Sales) 
Los Angeles $1800 
San Diego $250 
Boston> $700

The GROUP BY keyword is used when we are selecting multiple columns from a table (or tables) and at least one arithmetic operator appears in theSELECT statement. When that happens, we need to GROUP BY all the other selected columns, i.e., all columns except the one(s) operated on by the arithmetic operator