MySQL Query GROUP BY day / month / year

Question

Is it possible to make a simple query to count how many records I have in a determined period of time like a year, month, or day, having a TIMESTAMP field, like:

SELECT COUNT(id)
FROM stats
WHERE record_date.YEAR = 2009
GROUP BY record_date.YEAR

Or even:

SELECT COUNT(id)
FROM stats
GROUP BY record_date.YEAR, record_date.MONTH

To have a monthly statistic.

Thanks!

Solution 1

GROUP BY YEAR(record_date), MONTH(record_date)

Check out the date and time functions in MySQL.

Solution 2

GROUP BY DATE_FORMAT(record_date, '%Y%m')

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Note (primarily, to potential downvoters). Presently, this may not be as efficient as other suggestions. Still, I leave it as an alternative, and a one, too, that can serve in seeing how faster other solutions are. (For you can't really tell fast from slow until you see the difference.) Also, as time goes on, changes could be made to MySQL's engine with regard to optimisation so as to make this solution, at some (perhaps, not so distant) point in future, to become quite comparable in efficiency with most others.

Solution 3

try this one

SELECT COUNT(id)
FROM stats
GROUP BY EXTRACT(YEAR_MONTH FROM record_date)

EXTRACT(unit FROM date) function is better as less grouping is used and the function return a number value.

Comparison condition when grouping will be faster than DATE_FORMAT function (which return a string value). Try using function|field that return non-string value for SQL comparison condition (WHERE, HAVING, ORDER BY, GROUP BY).

Solution 4

I tried using the 'WHERE' statement above, I thought its correct since nobody corrected it but I was wrong; after some searches I found out that this is the right formula for the WHERE statement so the code becomes like this:

SELECT COUNT(id)  
FROM stats  
WHERE YEAR(record_date) = 2009  
GROUP BY MONTH(record_date)

Solution 5

If your search is over several years, and you still want to group monthly, I suggest:

version #1:

SELECT SQL_NO_CACHE YEAR(record_date), MONTH(record_date), COUNT(*)
FROM stats
GROUP BY DATE_FORMAT(record_date, '%Y%m')

version #2 (more efficient):

SELECT SQL_NO_CACHE YEAR(record_date), MONTH(record_date), COUNT(*)
FROM stats
GROUP BY YEAR(record_date)*100 + MONTH(record_date)

I compared these versions on a big table with 1,357,918 rows (innodb), and the 2nd version appears to have better results.

version1 (average of 10 executes): 1.404 seconds
version2 (average of 10 executes): 0.780 seconds

(SQL_NO_CACHE key added to prevent MySQL from CACHING to queries.)

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