How to Get and Sort Counts per Value in SQL

The aim of this pagešŸ“ is to explain how to sort counts of a certain value in descending order based on the particular example of a SQL query. In my case, I am writing a self-review and I was curious how many tickets I handled. I have a data set containing all tickets for last year (no need to filter to give year) with many fields. I am only interested in what the counts for tickets with my name in assignee column.

Pavol Kutaj
1 min readFeb 5, 2024
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  • Here it is: a simple 4-liner containing the pattern
SELECT assignee, COUNT(*) as ticket_count
FROM tickets
GROUP BY assignee
ORDER BY ticket_count DESC;

Use the SELECT statement to retrieve the desired columns.

  • Utilize the COUNT(*) function to calculate the count of all rows
  • Group the result set using the GROUP BY a clause specifying the value you want to count - in my case how many tickets were assigned to me
  • Sort the result set in descending order using the ORDER BY clause with DESC.

By following this pattern, you can retrieve counts of a certain value and sort them in descending order to analyze and prioritize your data effectively.

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Pavol Kutaj
Pavol Kutaj

Written by Pavol Kutaj

Today I Learnt | Infrastructure Support Engineer at snowplow.io with a passion for cloud infrastructure/terraform/python/docs. More at https://pavol.kutaj.com

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