ORA-00979 not a group by expression

Question

I am getting ORA-00979 with the following query:

SELECT cr.review_sk, cr.cs_sk, cr.full_name,
tolist(to_char(cf.fact_date, \'mm/dd/yyyy\')) \"appt\",
cs.cs_i         


        

Answer 1

Too bad Oracle has limitations like these. Sure, the result for a column not in the GROUP BY would be random, but sometimes you want that. Silly Oracle, you can do this in MySQL/MSSQL.

BUT there is a work around for Oracle:

While the following line does not work

SELECT unique_id_col, COUNT(1) AS cnt FROM yourTable GROUP BY col_A;

You can trick Oracle with some 0's like the following, to keep your column in scope, but not group by it (assuming these are numbers, otherwise use CONCAT)

SELECT MAX(unique_id_col) AS unique_id_col, COUNT(1) AS cnt 
FROM yourTable GROUP BY col_A, (unique_id_col*0 + col_A);