Summarizing Data: Group By

Intro

Let’s get a distinct list of countries in our database. We can do this in two ways:

Example 1

SELECT DISTINCT COUNTRY FROM music.Users;

Example 2

SELECT
	COUNTRY
FROM music.Users
GROUP BY
	COUNTRY;

Both these examples return the same result set. So why use one over the other?

• Example 1 is less verbose.
• Example 2 can be used with aggregation functions