Aggregate means a whole, the term is most used in economics (if you have ever taken an economics class, you probably remember how painful it was :)), it basically means ‘as a whole’. So, we’ll cover a few simple aggregate functions , avg,max, and min.

Remember the price we concatenated with a string? What if we wanted to see the average price of all our the products in our products table?

SELECT AVG(price) AS average_price FROM products;

the query would return something along the lines of 23.94443, obviously depending the prices in your table , if it were cars, it might be 23,232.2238576.

Notice we also used an alias in there.

Now , what if we wanted to find the minimum and maximum price in our products table?

SELECT MIN(price) AS mini_price, MAX(price) AS max_price FROM products;

The output should be two numbers let’s say : $3.99 $599.99

That’s it, aggregate functions are often overlooked as an easy way to get quick info.

discuss this topic to forum