Question

first is the disclaimer, I did not design the database I am now supporting and I would not have designed it this way, but here I am.

Problem: My client has a table in his database that contains listings for rentals. In this table is a text field to store the city of the listing. What my client is hoping to see is a dropdown list of all the unique cities with a number next to each one representing how many listings are in that city.

Ignoring for the time being spelling and capitalization issues, what Sql should I use to get the unique list along with each items count? For a proof of concept I queried for the distinct list of cities (easy enough), and then iterated through each one querying the number of times it is in the table. This is obviously horribly inefficient.

Can someone help me with the Sql to do all this in one statement?

Answer 1

SELECT
 CityName,
 COUNT(*) AS CityListings
FROM
 YourTable
GROUP BY
 CityName
ORDER BY
 CityName