I’ve started my own thread on this question so as to have less overhead from posting it on someone else’s thread. I have trouble understanding in SQL what the difference is between GROUP BY and ORDER BY. I know there have been threads made about this, but they don’t provide me with a useful answer. Here is something along the general lines of the same answer I just saw repeated many times in other threads:
ORDER BY sorts rows based on their values in a certain column, whereas GROUP BY groups rows with the same values in a certain column to help with aggregate functions.
To me that just seems to virtually describe the same things in two different wordings. I basically need this paraphrased completely. The problem is that ORDER BY does “group things” the same way that GROUP BY does, possibly with the sole exception that GROUP BY might possibly go without guarantees as to there being some sort of special order. Furthermore I just don’t see how GROUP BY would help any more with an aggregate function that ORDER BY would.
Please explain the difference in a different way than most do. Thanks!
Instead of:
GROUP BY will show ONE “a” followed by some kind of aggregation of the other column (maybe average).
ORDER BY will keep all the a aa a a a, and just order the rows based on one of the columns (so maybe a 1 will be first).
So in the end, GROUP BY will result in one row in this case, while ORDER BY will have the same number of rows as the original.