Question

I have a table that contains entries based on expense purchases. If there are three columns that I need results from (department, month, total) like below.

dept | month | total
--------------------
aaaa | octob | 8  
aaaa | octob | 4  
aaaa | novm  | 143  
bbbb | octob | 42  
bbbb | novm  | 116  
bbbb | novm  | 117  
bbbb | decm  | 5  

I would like to see a results set like this:

dept | oct | nov | dec
----------------------
aaaa | 12 | 143  | 0
bbbb | 42 | 233  | 5

Answer 1

Not exactly what you are asking for, but the way I would accomplish this is the following:

Select department, month, sum(total)
FROM MyTable
GROUP BY (department, month)

This will return a result set like:

department | Month | Total
  Geology  |  Oct  |  500
  Geology  |  Nov  |  400
  Biology  |  Oct  |  250

etc. Then you can order and use in code to get the format you want above.

For exactly what you asked for it is something like:

SELECT department, SUM(CASE WHEN Month='oct' THEN Total END) as Oct,
   SUM(CASE WHEN name='Nov' THEN Total END) as Nov
FROM MyTable
Group By (department)

Although I am not entirely sure this works correctly with group by.