unique items in a database

robives

Hi,
I have a table in a database - saleshistory
it is made up of item, price, datesold
I am trying to display a graph of sales so need to find all the unique instances of item then count them. Is there as easy way to do this?
I hope this is the right place to post as it is mysql aswell as php!

thanks in advance

best
- Rob

paulnaj

Hi Rob,

It'll be something like ...

<?php
$sql = "SELECT DISTINCT item FROM saleshistory";
$res = mysql_query($sql);
$num_unique_items = mysql_num_row($res);
?>

Paul 🙂

PS. The best way to get a response usually is to try and show how far you've got already, and try and show exactly where your problems lies.

Since you're new, it might be worth having a read of the forum guidelines.

robives

Thanks Paul, that was quick!
can I then use this to find out the number of each item in the list, eg if the list is of type of animal I now understand how to find out the number of animals, can I now find out how many of each there are?
Thanks - I'm off to read the guidelines now :-)

Matt_Kindig

Since you want to combine both COUNT and GROUP BY clauses, I don't think you'll be able to do this in a single MySQL statement.

A quick google search found this on another forum. They used two different queries--one to get the distinct types, and one to produce counts for each type. This sounds like what you are looking for.

-Matt