In SQL, how can you “group by” in ranges?

Question

Suppose I have a table with a numeric column (lets call it \"score\").

I\'d like to generate a table of counts, that shows how many times scores appeared in each ran

Answer 1

Because the column being sorted on (Range) is a string, string/word sorting is used instead of numeric sorting.

As long as the strings have zeros to pad out the number lengths the sorting should still be semantically correct:

SELECT t.range AS ScoreRange,
       COUNT(*) AS NumberOfOccurrences
  FROM (SELECT CASE
                    WHEN score BETWEEN 0 AND 9 THEN '00-09'
                    WHEN score BETWEEN 10 AND 19 THEN '10-19'
                    ELSE '20-99'
               END AS Range
          FROM Scores) t
 GROUP BY t.Range

If the range is mixed, simply pad an extra zero:

SELECT t.range AS ScoreRange,
       COUNT(*) AS NumberOfOccurrences
  FROM (SELECT CASE
                    WHEN score BETWEEN 0 AND 9 THEN '000-009'
                    WHEN score BETWEEN 10 AND 19 THEN '010-019'
                    WHEN score BETWEEN 20 AND 99 THEN '020-099'
                    ELSE '100-999'
               END AS Range
          FROM Scores) t
 GROUP BY t.Range