If you want to have faster turnaround on your forum questions, you will need to provide enough information to the forum users in order to answer your question.

In particular, talking about T-SQL questions, there are three things that your question must include:

1. Table scripts
2. Sample data
3. Expected output

Table Script and Sample data

Please make sure that anyone trying to answer your question can quickly work on the same data set you’re working on, or, at least the problematic part of it. The data should be in the same place where you have it, which is inside your tables.

You will have to provide a script that creates your table and inserts data inside that table.

Converting your data to INSERT statements can be tedious: fortunately, some tools can do it for you.

How do you convert a SSMS results grid, a CSV file or an Excel spreadsheet to INSERT statements? In other words, how do you convert this…

into this?

USE [tempdb]
GO
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Person](
[BusinessEntityID] [int] NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED,
[PersonType] [nchar](2) NOT NULL,
[FirstName] [nvarchar](50) NOT NULL,
[LastName] [nvarchar](50) NOT NULL
)
GO
INSERT INTO Person VALUES (6106,'IN','Beth','Carlson');
INSERT INTO Person VALUES (17889,'IN','Dennis','Li');
INSERT INTO Person VALUES (17989,'IN','Brent','Li');
INSERT INTO Person VALUES (9424,'IN','Brad','Raji');
INSERT INTO Person VALUES (5842,'IN','Aimee','She');
INSERT INTO Person VALUES (2144,'GC','Carol','Philips');
INSERT INTO Person VALUES (2582,'IN','Gregory','Tang');
INSERT INTO Person VALUES (2012,'SC','Jian','Wang');
INSERT INTO Person VALUES (12624,'IN','Clayton','She');
INSERT INTO Person VALUES (12509,'IN','Madison','Russell');
GO

The easiest way to perform the transformation is to copy all the data and paste it over at ConvertCSV:

Another great tool for this task is SQLFiddle.

OPTIONAL: The insert statements will include the field names: if you want to make your code more concise, you can remove that part by selecting the column names with your mouse holding the ALT key and then delete the selection. Here’s a description of how the rectangular selection works in SSMS 2012 and 2014 (doesn’t work in SSMS 2008).

Expected output

The expected output should be something immediately readable and understandable. There’s another tool that can help you obtain it.

Go to http://www.sensefulsolutions.com/2010/10/format-text-as-table.html and paste your data in the textarea, press “Create Table” and voila.

Here’s what your output should look like:

+------------+-------------+
| PersonType | PersonCount |
+------------+-------------+
| GC         |           1 |
| IN         |           8 |
| SC         |           1 |
+------------+-------------+

Show what you have tried

Everybody will be more willing to help you if you show that you have put some effort into solving your problem. If you have a query, include it, even if it doesn’t do exactly what you’re after.

Please please please, format your query before posting! You can format your queries online for free at PoorSQL.com

Simply paste your code then open the “Formatted SQL” tab to grab your code in a more readable way.

Putting it all together

Here is what your question should look like when everything is ok:

Hi all, I have a table called Person and I have to extract the number of rows for each person type.

This is the table script and some sample data:

USE [tempdb]
GO
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Person](
[BusinessEntityID] [int] NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED,
[PersonType] [nchar](2) NOT NULL,
[FirstName] [nvarchar](50) NOT NULL,
[LastName] [nvarchar](50) NOT NULL
)
GO
INSERT INTO Person VALUES (6106,'IN','Beth','Carlson');
INSERT INTO Person VALUES (17889,'IN','Dennis','Li');
INSERT INTO Person VALUES (17989,'IN','Brent','Li');
INSERT INTO Person VALUES (9424,'IN','Brad','Raji');
INSERT INTO Person VALUES (5842,'IN','Aimee','She');
INSERT INTO Person VALUES (2144,'GC','Carol','Philips');
INSERT INTO Person VALUES (2582,'IN','Gregory','Tang');
INSERT INTO Person VALUES (2012,'SC','Jian','Wang');
INSERT INTO Person VALUES (12624,'IN','Clayton','She');
INSERT INTO Person VALUES (12509,'IN','Madison','Russell');

This is what I’m trying to obtain:

+------------+-------------+
| PersonType | PersonCount |
+------------+-------------+
| GC         |           1 |
| IN         |           8 |
| SC         |           1 |
+------------+-------------+

Here is what I have tried:

SELECT PersonType
FROM Person

How do I do that?

If you include this information in your posts, I promise you will get blazingly fast answers.