GROUP BY part of field

[shawjames]

I have a column that have fields of value like "ABC1234"

I want to do a SELECT that groups by any of these fields that start with "ABC"

So the result will give:

AAA 5
AAB 1
AAC 12
AAD 15

Where the number is how many entries were found that start with the corresponding 3 letters.

Any ideas?

[Roger_Ramjet]

SELECT left(col1,3) as str, count(col1) FROM table
GROUP BY str, col1

Should do it. The left(col1,3) will return the first 3 chars from col1 so you should then get a count of how many rows have the same first 3 chars.