I am going to take the Microsoft MCTS Exam 70-433 – SQL Server 2008 Database Development. So I bought the corresponding book from Microsoft Press for this very exam:
Altough I have a lot of experience with SQL in general and the SQL Server in particular I decided to read Chapter 1 where they explain the SQL basics, to be sure to get it all. When I came to the part where they explained the GROUP BY clause, I stumbled across the following simple SQL statement (page 20):
SELECT Production.Product.ProductSubcategoryID , AVG(ListPrice) AS 'Average' , MIN(ListPrice) AS 'Minimum' , MAX(ListPrice) AS 'Maximum' FROM Production.Product WHERE ListPrice <> 0 GROUP BY Product.ProductSubcategoryID;
The result set:
ProductSubcategoryID | Average | Minimum | Maximum NULL 159.1333 133.34 196.92 1 1683.365 539.99 3399.99 2 1597.54 539.99 3578.27 ...What follows is this explanation of the result set:
The top row, where the ProductSubcategoryID is listed as NULL, is the summary row that provides the average, minimum and maxiumum list prices of products across all subcategories.
Aggregate functions with a simple GROUP BY do return a summary row? Could it be that I missed that all the years? Obviously the first row is simple the group of rows with ProductSubcategoryID of NULL and not a summary row. Or do I miss something here?
I know there is a WITH ROLLUP clause which produces summary rows, but this is explained in the next chapter of the book, so I don’t think it a simple typo.
Btw, this example uses the AdventureWorks2008 example database from Microsoft.