Oracle: how to “group by” over a range?

Question

If I have a table like this:

pkey   age
----   ---
   1     8
   2     5
   3    12
   4    12
   5    22

I can \"group by\" to get a count

Answer 1

Can you try the below solution:

SELECT count (1), '1-10'  where age between 1 and 10
union all 
SELECT count (1), '11-20'  where age between 11 and 20
union all
select count (1), '21+' where age >20
from age 

Answer 2

SELECT CASE 
         WHEN age <= 10 THEN '1-10' 
         WHEN age <= 20 THEN '11-20' 
         ELSE '21+' 
       END AS age, 
       COUNT(*) AS n
FROM age
GROUP BY CASE 
           WHEN age <= 10 THEN '1-10' 
           WHEN age <= 20 THEN '11-20' 
           ELSE '21+' 
         END

Answer 3

If using Oracle 9i+, you might be able to use the NTILE analytic function:

WITH tiles AS (
  SELECT t.age,
         NTILE(3) OVER (ORDER BY t.age) AS tile
    FROM TABLE t)
  SELECT MIN(t.age) AS min_age,
         MAX(t.age) AS max_age,
         COUNT(t.tile) As n
    FROM tiles t
GROUP BY t.tile

The caveat to NTILE is that you can only specify the number of partitions, not the break points themselves. So you need to specify a number that is appropriate. IE: With 100 rows, NTILE(4) will allot 25 rows to each of the four buckets/partitions. You can not nest analytic functions, so you'd have to layer them using subqueries/subquery factoring to get desired granularity. Otherwise, use:

  SELECT CASE t.age
           WHEN BETWEEN 1 AND 10 THEN '1-10' 
           WHEN BETWEEN 11 AND 20 THEN '11-20' 
           ELSE '21+' 
         END AS age, 
         COUNT(*) AS n
    FROM TABLE t
GROUP BY CASE t.age
           WHEN BETWEEN 1 AND 10 THEN '1-10' 
           WHEN BETWEEN 11 AND 20 THEN '11-20' 
           ELSE '21+' 
         END

Answer 4

I had to group data by how many transactions appeared in an hour. I did this by extracting the hour from the timestamp:

select extract(hour from transaction_time) as hour
      ,count(*)
from   table
where  transaction_date='01-jan-2000'
group by
       extract(hour from transaction_time)
order by
       extract(hour from transaction_time) asc
;

Giving output:

HOUR COUNT(*)
---- --------
   1     9199 
   2     9167 
   3     9997 
   4     7218

As you can see this gives a nice easy way of grouping the number of records per hour.