"Group By"

[jgelpi16]

Quick question...



I have a table with 50,000 records in it. It was a linked table and one of the fields I needed to convert to numeric. So, I went ahead and put my "Val()" conversion formula in the necessary field. Initially I had made everything a "Group By" in the "total" field. I ran the query and I only received 48,000 records as the result. I took off the "Group By" and the query returned 50,000 records. I was under the impression the "Group By" did not consolidate records. I know this seems elementary, but never ran across something like this before.

[ajetrumpet]

of course it does! the statement is used most with aggregates, which of course are mathematical calculations. And of course math like that is not supposed to return every record, right?

in scenarios like that, the group by clause it used to identify unique combinations, as those that result from the clause, and hence all of the extra records with those unique combination of values from the clause are not needed. Thus, suppressed from the result set.

make sense?

[jgelpi16]

Makes perfect sense. Thank you!