Re: Complicated query on very simple database - pointers sought

Look into Aggregate Functions. They can let you do the things that you are looking for. SELECT Month(OrderDate) as 'Month', Count(DISTINCT Customer) as 'NumCustomersOrdering', Count(Customer) as 'TotalOrders' FROM tbl_Orders GROUP BY Month(OrderDate) will give you a list of months, and the number of Customer Orders. Throw in a distinct if you want to know how many different customers ordered. The GROUP BY clause basically tells it when to reset the counter. You can get sums, averages, counts, etc using aggregates. Check this page for more information: http://www.mysql.com/doc/G/r/Group_by_functions.html (I mainly use MSSQL, so the syntax might be slightly different - refer to the URL above for specifics). "George Pitcher" <phpdevuk@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message news:03b701c20190$8f53fe00$630db092@HLATITUDE... > Hi all, > > I want to report some figures to my colleagues. > > My database (2 fields: Customer, Order date) contains over 15000 records > dating back to 1999. > > I want to be able to show, in a web page, the following information > > Month Customers placing orders Orders placed > Average Orders/Cust Average over prev 12 months. > > My work with MySQL has never been this detailed. > > Can anyone give me any pointers? > > Regards > > George in Edinburgh >