Question

I have a co-worker who is working on a table with an ‘amount’ column.
They would like to get the top 5 amounts and the sum of the amounts in the same query.

I know you could do this:

SELECT TOP 5 amount FROM table 
UNION SELECT SUM(amount) FROM table
ORDER BY amount DESC

But this produces results like this:

1000  (sum)
 100
  70
  50
  30
  20

When what they really need is this:

100 | 1000
 70 | 1000
 50 | 1000
 30 | 1000
 20 | 1000

My intuitive attempts to achieve this tend to run into grouping problems, which isn’t such an issue when you are selecting a different column, but is when you want to use an aggregate function based on the column you are selecting.

Answer 1

You can use a CROSS JOIN for this:

SELECT TOP 5 a.amount, b.sum
FROM table a
CROSS JOIN (SELECT SUM(amount) sum FROM table) b
ORDER BY amount DESC