Can someone please explain what the partition by keyword does and give a simple example of it in action, as well as why one would want to use it? I have a SQL query written by someone else and I'm trying to figure out what it does.
An example of partition by:
SELECT empno, deptno, COUNT(*)
OVER (PARTITION BY deptno) DEPT_COUNT
FROM emp
The examples I've seen online seem a bit too in-depth.
The PARTITION BY clause sets the range of records that will be used for each "GROUP" within the OVER clause.
In your example SQL, DEPT_COUNT will return the number of employees within that department for every employee record. (It is as if you're de-nomalising the emp table; you still return every record in the emp table.)
emp_no dept_no DEPT_COUNT
1 10 3
2 10 3
3 10 3 <- three because there are three "dept_no = 10" records
4 20 2
5 20 2 <- two because there are two "dept_no = 20" records
If there was another column (e.g., state) then you could count how many departments in that State.
It is like getting the results of a GROUP BY (SUM, AVG, etc.) without the aggregating the result set (i.e. removing matching records).
It is useful when you use the LAST OVER or MIN OVER functions to get, for example, the lowest and highest salary in the department and then use that in a calculation against this records salary without a sub select, which is much faster.
Read the linked AskTom article for further details.
It is the SQL extension called analytics. The "over" in the select statement tells oracle that the function is a analytical function, not a group by function. The advantage to using analytics is that you can collect sums, counts, and a lot more with just one pass through of the data instead of looping through the data with sub selects or worse, PL/SQL.
It does look confusing at first but this will be second nature quickly. No one explains it better then Tom Kyte. So the link above is great.
Of course, reading the documentation is a must.
I think, this example suggests a small nuance on how the partitioning works and how group by works. My example is from Oracle 12, if my example happens to be a compiling bug.
I tried :
SELECT t.data_key
, SUM ( CASE when t.state = 'A' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END)
OVER (PARTITION BY t.data_key) count_a_rows
, SUM ( CASE when t.state = 'B' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END)
OVER (PARTITION BY t.data_key) count_b_rows
, SUM ( CASE when t.state = 'C' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END)
OVER (PARTITION BY t.data_key) count_c_rows
, COUNT (1) total_rows
from mytable t
group by t.data_key ---- This does not compile as the compiler feels that t.state isn't in the group by and doesn't recognize the aggregation I'm looking for
This however works as expected :
SELECT distinct t.data_key
, SUM ( CASE when t.state = 'A' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END)
OVER (PARTITION BY t.data_key) count_a_rows
, SUM ( CASE when t.state = 'B' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END)
OVER (PARTITION BY t.data_key) count_b_rows
, SUM ( CASE when t.state = 'C' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END)
OVER (PARTITION BY t.data_key) count_c_rows
, COUNT (1) total_rows
from mytable t;
Producing the number of elements in each state based on the external key "data_key". So, if, data_key = 'APPLE' had 3 rows with state 'A', 2 rows with state 'B', a row with state 'C', the corresponding row for 'APPLE' would be 'APPLE', 3, 2, 1, 6.