This lesson will teach you how to use the aggregate function COUNT(). If you missed the Aggregate Introduction Lesson, please check it out now, as it explains many concepts used in this lesson!

We will be using the "products" table that we constructed to display the use of MySQL's COUNT function.

You can download the products.sql file from our website. If you are new to MySQL you will need to know how to Create a MySQL Table and Insert a MySQL Rowfirst.

Below is the MySQL table "products".

Products Table:

mysql count - counting records

The COUNT function is an aggregate function that simply counts all the items that are in a group. The "products" table that is displayed above has several products of various types. One use of COUNT might be to find out how many items of each type there are in the table.

Just as we did in the aggregate introduction lesson, we are going to GROUP BY type to create four groups: Music, Toy, Clothing and Food. For a slight change of pace, let's count the name column to find how many products there are per type.

<?php
// Make a MySQL Connection

$query = "SELECT type, COUNT(name) FROM products GROUP BY type"; 
	 
$result = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());

// Print out result
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
	echo "There are ". $row['COUNT(name)'] ." ". $row['type'] ." items.";
	echo "<br />";
}
?>

Display: