Count distinct values

Question

I have a data set asking a customer how many pets they have for example. Is there a way with one query I can count the distinct values (1,2,3, etc)? Thanks!

Answer 1

Ok, I deleted my previous answer because finally it was not what willlangford was looking for, but I made my point that maybe we were all misunderstanding the question.

I also thought of the SELECT DISTINCT... thing at first, but it seemed too weird to me that someone needed to know how many people had a different number of pets than the rest... thats why I thought that maybe the question was not clear enough.

So, now that the real question meaning is clarified, making a subquery for this its quite an overhead, I would preferably use a GROUP BY clause.

Imagine you have the table customer_pets like this:

+-----------------------+
|  customer  |   pets   |
+------------+----------+
| customer1  |    2     |
| customer2  |    3     |
| customer3  |    2     |
| customer4  |    2     |
| customer5  |    3     |
| customer6  |    4     |
+------------+----------+

then

SELECT count(customer) AS num_customers, pets FROM customer_pets GROUP BY pets

would return:

+----------------------------+
|  num_customers  |   pets   |
+-----------------+----------+
|        3        |    2     |
|        2        |    3     |
|        1        |    4     |
+-----------------+----------+

as you need.