5 most common ways of using count() function in Oracle

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For the examples provided below, I am considering this simple table

CREATE TABLE TEMP_EMPLOYEE (
ID INT
,NAME VARCHAR(255)
,LOCATION VARCHAR(255)
);

With values as shown below —

This gives the count of records in the table.

This also gives the count of records in the table

This gives the count of NOT NULL records.

Let’s use count(ID), if you see the records, ID is populated for all the records so the count would be 4

But, if we use count(LOCATION), the count would be 3 because there is one record with value NULL in this column

Let’s add 3 more records into our table now, just to play around more!

This will count the number of distinct values in the specified column

We can always use count() examples provided above with a group by clause.

The example provides the number of people live in each location.

These are the basic usages, I hope you enjoyed learning!

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Data Engineer at Amazon. I write about Data, Product & Life.

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