Question

I need to sum the totals of a row except the first column.
Something similar too:

SELECT SUM( col2 + col3 + col4 +colN)
FROM numbers
WHERE user_name = ‘person’;

My table will continuously have columns added to it. So I want it to automatically pick up the sum of the new columns too without it needing to be hard coded into the query?

user_name  | Col | col2 | Col3 | Col4 + other columns.

person1    |  2  |  3   | 76   | 56  etc.    ---------> sum of row

person2    |  6  |  72  | 200  | 13  etc.    ---------> sum of row

Thanks in advance for any help!

Answer 1

Not wishing to ‘avoid’ the question, but it looks like you could do with having a different data structure.

You should consider having a ‘users’ table with columns for id and user_name, and a new table (e.g. properties) with a row for each of the other columns in your current table (Col1, Col2 … ColN). The new table would then have a column for user_name to link it to the users table.

That way you’d be able to do something like:

SELECT SUM(property_column) FROM properties WHERE user_name = <RequiredUserName>

I’d also recommend selecting users by ID (i.e. have the properties table with a user_id column, rather than a user_name column), unless you’re confident that a user_name is never going to change (and even then…).