Question

Can someone please explain what the partition by keyword does and give a simple example of it in action, as well as why one would want to use it? I have a SQL query written by someone else and I’m trying to figure out what it does.

An example of partition by:

SELECT empno, deptno, COUNT(*)  OVER (PARTITION BY deptno) DEPT_COUNT FROM emp 

The examples I’ve seen online seem a bit too in-depth.

Answer 1

The PARTITION BY clause sets the range of records that will be used for each ‘GROUP’ within the OVER clause.

In your example SQL, DEPT_COUNT will return the number of employees within that department for every employee record. (It is as if you’re de-nomalising the emp table; you still return every record in the emp table.)

emp_no  dept_no  DEPT_COUNT 1       10       3 2       10       3 3       10       3 <- three because there are three 'dept_no = 10' records 4       20       2 5       20       2 <- two because there are two 'dept_no = 20' records 

If there was another column (e.g., state) then you could count how many departments in that State.

It is like getting the results of a GROUP BY (SUM, AVG, etc.) without the aggregating the result set (i.e. removing matching records).

It is useful when you use the LAST OVER or MIN OVER functions to get, for example, the lowest and highest salary in the department and then use that in a calculation against this records salary without a sub select, which is much faster.

Read the linked AskTom article for further details.