I am trying to understand GROUP BY (new to oracle dbms) without aggregate function.
How does it operate?
Here is what i have tried.
EMP table on
The only real use case for GROUP BY without aggregation is when you GROUP BY more columns than are selected, in which case the selected columns might be repeated. Otherwise you might as well use a DISTINCT.
It's worth noting that other RDBMS's do not require that all non-aggregated columns be included in the GROUP BY. For example in PostgreSQL if the primary key columns of a table are included in the GROUP BY then other columns of that table need not be as they are guaranteed to be distinct for every distinct primary key column. I've wished in the past that Oracle did the same as it would have made for more compact SQL in many cases.