SQL how many records start with the same letter

Question

So I have thousands of records in a database in a column A.

I want to see how many start with each letter of the alphabet and all single digit numbers.

So i need

Answer 1

You can generally GROUP BY an expression like LEFT(columnname, 1), which allows you to perform a COUNT() aggregate grouped by an arbitrary expression. The most ideal substring function to use may depend on your RDBMS.

SELECT
  UPPER(LEFT(columnname, 1)) AS first_char,
  COUNT(*)
FROM yourtable
GROUP BY UPPER(LEFT(columnname, 1))
ORDER BY first_char ASC

Likewise, to get the 2 character match

SELECT
  UPPER(LEFT(columnname, 2)) AS first_2char,
  COUNT(*)
FROM yourtable
GROUP BY UPPER(LEFT(columnname, 2))
ORDER BY first_2char ASC

Some RDBMS will allow you to use the column alias in the GROUP BY rather than the full expression, as in the simplified GROUP BY first_char.

Note that I have upper-cased them so you don't get separate matches for Ab, AB, ab, aB if you are using a case-sensitive collation. (I believe SQL Server uses case-insensitive collations by default, however)