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MySQL queries

Some useful tricks for working with data from MySQL tables.

Aggregation

Getting aggregated data by period

Given a table like:

id create_date value
1 2018-12-01 19:00:00 10
2 2018-11-30 18:30:00 7
3 2018-11-20 12:15:00 3
4 2018-11-10 16:32:00 6

we want to obtain the totals from the value column grouped by different periods of time, using the available MySQL date and time functions.

By day

select
date(create_date) as day,
sum(value) as total
from my_table
group by day
order by day desc

By week

select
yearweek(create_date) as week,
sum(value) as total
from my_table
group by week
order by week desc

By month

Grouping by month is the only case where MySQL doesn't have a dedicated date function, so we'll use date_format to extract the year and month from the date:

select
date_format(create_date, "%Y-%m") as month,
sum(value) as total
from my_table
group by month
order by month desc

Alternatively, we can use extract(year_month from create_date) instead of date_format.

By year

select
year(create_date) as year,
sum(value) as total
from my_table
group by year
order by year desc

Aggregation on more than one column

Given a table like:

id create_date currency value
1 2018-12-01 19:00:00 usd 10
2 2018-11-30 18:30:00 eur 7
3 2018-11-20 12:15:00 eur 3
4 2018-11-10 16:32:00 usd 6

You can group them by period and currency:

select
date(create_date) as day,
currency,
sum(value) as total
from my_table
group by day, currency
order by day desc

To give results in the form:

day currency total
2018-12-01 usd 10
2018-12-01 eur 7
2018-11-30 usd 5
2018-11-30 eur 3

Say you want to turn the values of the currency column into individual columns. I don't know (yet) any other method of pivoting the chart than creating the columns manually:

select
date(create_date) as day,
sum(case when currency = 'usd' then value else 0 end) as usd,
sum(case when currency = 'eur' then value else 0 end) as eur,
sum(value) as total
from my_table
group by day, currency
order by day desc

To obtain:

day usd eur total
2018-12-01 10 7 17
2018-11-30 5 3 8

(This, of course, breaks down when there are several possible unique values for the column, but it's not to bad when they're a handful.)