Question

I’m using VBScript (ASP Classic) and SQL Server; I’m trying to have a section on the website where you can see a count of products at certain price levels. Something like:

$50 - $100 (4) $100 - $500 (198) $500 - $1000 (43) 

For the love of me I cannot figure out a good way to do a query like this. I mean… I know how to get the number of products at a certain price range, but I can’t figure out how to do it at several different price ranges without having to write a boatload of nested queries to aggregate all the results, especially since the price ranges can differ greatly among related products.

Is there a ‘rule of thumb’ when doing something like this as to how you figure out the different price ranges?

Answer 1

The most efficient way of doing this in SQL (I believe) is to use a sum case construct:

select  sum(case when Price >= 50 and Price < 100 then 1 else 0 end) as 50to100,         sum(case when Price >= 100 and Price < 500 then 1 else 0 end) as 100to500,         sum(case when Price >= 500 and Price < 1000 then 1 else 0 end) as 500to1000 from    Products 

This will only require a single scan of the table.