MySQL Pivot: How To Generate a Pivot Table

Do you want to learn how to generate pivoted data or pivot tables in MySQL?

In this article, you’ll learn:

• what the pivot concept is
• how to generate a pivot table in MySQL
• how to generate the column headings dynamically

Let’s get into the guide.

 

What is PIVOT?

The concept of a “pivot” is where data in rows is transformed to be shown in columns instead. It’s commonly used in Microsoft Excel where you create a Pivot Table to display data differently.

It groups your data based on some values and shows these in columns instead.

Some databases, such as SQL Server, have the PIVOT feature built-in.

However, in MySQL, there is no PIVOT feature or keyword. Fortunately, we can still generate this pivot table output.

Let’s see the sample data we’ll use, and then the code to generate the pivot table.

 

Sample Data and Expected Output

Let’s see some sample data and our expected output to help demonstrate what PIVOT can do.

We’ve got a product_sales table which has a product name, store location, and number of sales. Each of these are separate columns:

product_name	store_location	num_sales
Chair	North	55
Desk	Central	120
Couch	Central	78
Chair	South	23
Chair	South	10
Chair	North	98
Desk	West	61
Couch	North	180
Chair	South	14
Desk	North	45
Chair	North	87
Chair	Central	34
Desk	South	42
Couch	West	58
Couch	Central	27
Chair	South	91
Chair	West	82
Chair	North	37
Desk	North	68
Couch	Central	54
Chair	South	81
Desk	North	25
Chair	North	46
Chair	Central	121
Desk	South	85
Couch	North	43
Desk	West	10
Chair	North	5
Chair	Central	16
Desk	South	9
Couch	West	22
Couch	Central	59
Chair	South	76
Chair	West	48
Chair	North	19
Desk	North	3
Couch	West	63
Chair	South	81
Desk	North	85
Chair	North	90
Chair	Central	47
Desk	West	63
Couch	North	28

Here’s the sample data for this table: mysql_pivot_data.sql

You can download that SQL file to create and populate the tables yourself.

Let’s say we wanted to see this data with product names on the left and store locations across the top, with the number of sales at each intersection:

product_name	North	Central	South	West
Chair	437	218	376	130
Couch	251	218	0	143
Desk	226	120	136	134

We could extract it into an Excel file and create a pivot table.

Or, we could use SQL for this. Let’s see how we can do this.

 

MySQL Pivot using CASE

You can use a combination of an aggregate function and the CASE statement to show a pivot table.

How can we write a query to do this?

First, we write a SELECT query that gets the product names:

SELECT
product_name
FROM product_sales;

Then we add in the SUM function as another column:

SELECT
product_name,
SUM()
FROM product_sales;

For this SUM function, we want to show the sum of the num_sales column, but only where the store_location is North.

We can do this kind of logic using a CASE statement. And the important thing here is that a CASE statement can go inside a function.

So, we put a CASE statement inside the SUM function. We want the CASE statement to say “if the store location is North, then show the number of sales, otherwise show 0”.

SELECT
product_name,
SUM(CASE
  WHEN store_location = 'North' THEN num_sales ELSE 0 END
) AS north
FROM product_sales;

In this example we’ve also put a column alias of “north”, so we get that as a column heading instead of a long CASE statement.

Next, we add a GROUP BY clause, because we are showing a column and an aggregate function.

SELECT
product_name,
SUM(CASE
  WHEN store_location = 'North' THEN num_sales ELSE 0 END
) AS north
FROM product_sales
GROUP BY product_name;

We can run this query, even though there is only one column being calculated, and this is what will be shown:

product_name	north
Chair	437
Desk	226
Couch	251

We can now add on the rest of the columns. Add the same SUM and CASE functions but change the store_location to the value you want to check.

The query should look like this:

SELECT
product_name,
SUM(CASE
  WHEN store_location = 'North' THEN num_sales ELSE 0 END
) AS north,
SUM(CASE
  WHEN store_location = 'Central' THEN num_sales ELSE 0 END
) AS central,
SUM(CASE
  WHEN store_location = 'South' THEN num_sales ELSE 0 END
) AS south,
SUM(CASE
  WHEN store_location = 'West' THEN num_sales ELSE 0 END
) AS west
FROM product_sales
GROUP BY product_name;

When you run this query, you should get these results:

product_name	north	central	south	west
Chair	437	218	376	130
Desk	226	120	136	134
Couch	251	218	0	143

We can see the different locations as columns, the different products as rows, and the sum of sales at the intersection of product and location.

That’s how you can do a pivot table in MySQL. You can change the columns and rows to use by changing your query, but we’ve seen the general structure here.

 

Dynamic Pivot Columns

In the example above we generated a pivot table using an aggregate function (SUM) and a CASE statement. The downside to that approach is that we need to know the column headings when we write the query, and the more columns that appear the more code we need to write.

This may be OK for smaller results, but what if you don’t know all of the possible values? Or what if the values change?

There is a way to dynamically generate the columns of a PIVOT table output. We use the function called GROUP_CONCAT.

Here’s what the structure of the code is:

SET @sql = NULL;
SELECT GROUP_CONCAT(logic)
INTO @sql
FROM your_table;
 
SET @sql = CONCAT('select…', @sql, 'from…');
 
PREPARE stmt FROM @sql;
EXECUTE stmt;
DEALLOCATE PREPARE stmt;

We use the variable of @sql to store the results of GROUP_CONCAT to avoid characters after the 1024 limit of this function from being cut off.

We then add this value into the rest of the query by concatenating with a SELECT and FROM clause.

We then run it using PREPARE and EXECUTE.

Here’s what our real query would look like on the product_sales table.

SET @sql = NULL;
SELECT
GROUP_CONCAT(DISTINCT CONCAT(
  'SUM(
  CASE WHEN store_location = "', store_location, '" THEN num_sales ELSE 0 END) 
  AS ', store_location)
)
INTO @sql
FROM product_sales;
 
SET @sql = CONCAT('SELECT product_name, ', @sql, 
  ' FROM product_sales GROUP BY product_name');
SELECT @sql;
 
PREPARE stmt FROM @sql;
EXECUTE stmt;
DEALLOCATE PREPARE stmt;

We use the DISTINCT keyword inside GROUP_CONCAT so we get a unique list of store_locations. Otherwise, we’d get a very long list and our query would show an error.

Now when we run this query, this is what we see:

product_name	Central	North	South	West
Chair	218	437	376	130
Desk	120	226	136	134
Couch	218	251	0	143

With this example, your column headers are generated based on the values in the table.

 

Conclusion

While there are no MySQL PIVOT keywords available, you can use the SUM function (or other aggregate functions) as well as the CASE statement to generate a pivot table in MySQL.

You can also use the GROUP_CONCAT function and some procedural code to generate the list of columns dynamically.