In SQL, how can you "group by" in ranges?

An alternative approach would involve storing the ranges in a table, instead of embedding them in the query. You would end up with a table, call it Ranges, that looks like this:

LowerLimit   UpperLimit   Range 
0              9          '0-9'
10            19          '10-19'
20            29          '20-29'
30            39          '30-39'

And a query that looks like this:

Select
   Range as [Score Range],
   Count(*) as [Number of Occurences]
from
   Ranges r inner join Scores s on s.Score between r.LowerLimit and r.UpperLimit
group by Range

This does mean setting up a table, but it would be easy to maintain when the desired ranges change. No code changes necessary!


I see answers here that won't work in SQL Server's syntax. I would use:

select t.range as [score range], count(*) as [number of occurences]
from (
  select case 
    when score between  0 and  9 then ' 0-9 '
    when score between 10 and 19 then '10-19'
    when score between 20 and 29 then '20-29'
    ...
    else '90-99' end as range
  from scores) t
group by t.range

EDIT: see comments


Neither of the highest voted answers are correct on SQL Server 2000. Perhaps they were using a different version.

Here are the correct versions of both of them on SQL Server 2000.

select t.range as [score range], count(*) as [number of occurences]
from (
  select case  
    when score between 0 and 9 then ' 0- 9'
    when score between 10 and 19 then '10-19'
    else '20-99' end as range
  from scores) t
group by t.range

or

select t.range as [score range], count(*) as [number of occurrences]
from (
      select user_id,
         case when score >= 0 and score< 10 then '0-9'
         when score >= 10 and score< 20 then '10-19'
         else '20-99' end as range
     from scores) t
group by t.range