Question

I am starting with data that looks like this:

+----------+------------------+--------+
| specimen |       date       | bucket |
+----------+------------------+--------+
| 31598D   | 3/3/2010 11:38   |     10 |
| A113899  | 2/10/2010 13:50  |     11 |
| A121375  | 12/17/2010 10:06 |      2 |
| A122115  | 6/14/2010 9:33   |     10 |
| A122119  | 5/19/2010 10:08  |      3 |
| A122124  | 6/30/2010 11:43  |      4 |
| DD58834  | 6/17/2010 10:08  |      1 |
| 31598A   | 3/3/2010 11:36   |     10 |
+----------+------------------+--------+

I would like to know whether it is possible to transform it to a frequency distribution like this:

Would I use the pivot function in SQL Server? If so, how?

Please note that I do have access to SSRS, and can use that as a resource to tackle this challenge.

Thanks so much for your guidance and time

Answer 1

This is untested, as I don’t have a SQL Server instance handy, but it should illustrate the idea; you can SUM() over a case statement to generate the distribution you want.

SELECT
      [bucket]
    , SUM( CASE WHEN DATEPART(MONTH,[date]) = 1 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END ) AS [Jan]
    -- repeat the above for each month
FROM
    [your_table]
GROUP BY
    [bucket]
ORDER BY
    [bucket] DESC