Generating a histogram from column values in a database

sql sql-server histogram
Thorsten79 picture Thorsten79 · Jan 27, 2009 · Viewed 46k times · Source

Let's say I have a database column 'grade' like this:

|grade|
|    1|
|    2|
|    1|
|    3|
|    4|
|    5|

Is there a non-trivial way in SQL to generate a histogram like this?

|2,1,1,1,1,0|

where 2 means the grade 1 occurs twice, the 1s mean grades {2..5} occur once and 0 means grade 6 does not occur at all.

I don't mind if the histogram is one row per count.

If that matters, the database is SQL Server accessed by a perl CGI through unixODBC/FreeTDS.

EDIT: Thanks for your quick replies! It is okay if non-existing values (like grade 6 in the example above) do not occur as long as I can make out which histogram value belongs to which grade.

Answer

Ilya Volodin picture Ilya Volodin · Jan 27, 2009 
SELECT COUNT(grade) FROM table GROUP BY grade ORDER BY grade

Haven't verified it, but it should work.It will not, however, show count for 6s grade, since it's not present in the table at all...

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