On Sat, 2003-02-01 at 10:21, Luis Magaña wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have a question here:
> 
> I have a table with this fields:
> 
> month
> description
> amount
> 
> now I have to write a query that retrieves the sum of the amount from
> the minimum month to the maximum month registered for each diferent
> description.
> 
> Of course there are cases when a particular description has not record
> for all the months in that period.  I mean, suppouse you have this
> records:
> 
> month description     amount
> -----------------------------------------------
> June  description1    100     
> July  description1    500
> August        description1    600
> June  description2    300
> August        description2    400
> 
> how you write a query that outputs something like this:
> 
>               June    July    August
> ------------------------------------------
> description1 |        100     500     600
> description2 |        300     0       400
> 
> My problem is for the 0 value.

If you have another table with columns like:

month   description
--------------------
June    description1
July    description1
August  description1
June    description2
July    description2
August  description2

Then you will be able to do an outer join to it like:

SELECT * FROM t1 FULL OUTER JOIN t2 ON t1.month = t2.month AND
t1.description = t2.description

This will give you a NULL, rather than a zero, but your application
should be able to handle that detail.

You can also do this having two tables: one for the months, and another
for the descriptions:

SELECT * FROM months m CROSS JOIN descriptions d FULL OUTER JOIN values
v ON m.month = v.month AND d.description = v.description

I hope this is some use,
                                        Andrew.
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