Question

I’m working on a blog in PHP/SQL etc and I have come across something I think is too advanced (obviously) for my SQL knowledge. I’m creating an archive section where, when posts are made, it stores the date/time of its post in UNIX timestamp format. However I want the archive to show like this:

Date     Year Post Count
-------- ---- ----------
November 2011 2
December 2011 1

I can easily get this:

Date     Year Post Count
-------- ---- ----------
November 2011 2
November 2011 2
December 2011 1

Hope you can see what I’m trying to achieve. My current SQL statement for this is:

SELECT `post_date` FROM `blog_posts` ORDER BY `post_date` DESC

PHP handles most of the sorting and there is a way I can achieve this in PHP but I’m sure there’s an easier way in SQL.

Hope someone can help.

Answer 1

For MySQL (5.5) it would be close to following:

SELECT MONTHNAME(post_date) AS month_col,
YEAR(post_date) AS year_col,
COUNT(*) AS num_posts
FROM blog_posts
GROUP BY YEAR(post_date), MONTH(post_date)
ORDER BY year_col, month_col DESC;

Would return:

December, 2011, 3
November, 2011, 2
December, 2010, 1