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What does GROUP BY do?

GROUP BY groups rows that share the same values in the specified columns, so you can apply aggregate functions (COUNT, SUM, AVG, and so on) to each group separately.

Example

sql
SELECT department, AVG(salary) FROM employees GROUP BY department;

The data gets grouped by department, and the average salary is computed for each department.

Without GROUP BY, aggregate functions run over the whole table; with it, they run on each group of values.

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