The MySQL GROUP BY Statement

The GROUP BY statement groups rows that have the same values into summary rows, like "find the number of customers in each country".

The GROUP BY statement is often used with aggregate functions COUNT(), MAX(), MIN(), SUM(), AVG() to group the result-set by one or more columns.

GROUP BY Syntax

Demo Database

Below is a selection from the "Customers" table in the Northwind sample database:

MySQL GROUP BY Examples

The following SQL statement lists the number of customers in each country:

SELECT COUNT(CustomerID), Country FROM Customers GROUP BY Country;

The following SQL statement lists the number of customers in each country, sorted high to low:

SELECT COUNT(CustomerID), Country FROM Customers GROUP BY Country ORDER BY COUNT(CustomerID) DESC;

Demo Database

Below is a selection from the "Orders" table in the Northwind sample database:

And a selection from the "Shippers" table:

GROUP BY With JOIN Example

The following SQL statement lists the number of orders sent by each shipper:

SELECT Shippers.ShipperName, COUNT(Orders.OrderID) AS NumberOfOrders FROM Orders LEFT JOIN Shippers ON Orders.ShipperID = Shippers.ShipperID GROUP BY ShipperName;