SQL Server Query LEFT JOIN, SUM and GROUP BY and I'm stumped!

Question

I am beating my brain against this one

I have 3 SQL Server 2005 tables

userawards:

id, awardamount, userid, dateawarded, awardtypeid 

user:

id, firstname, lastname

awardtypes:

id, title

So if the awards table had the rows

1, 300.00, 3, 01-01-2011, 1
2, 125.00, 3, 01-05-2011, 1
3,  50.00, 2, 01-05-2011, 2

user table rows

1, john, smith
2, mark, smith
3, bob, smith

award types

1, cash
2, prize

and I want the output to look similar to this

bob smith, 425.00, cash
mark smith, 50, prize

etc etc.

A user can have multiple awards, the results need to display unique users, but with there total award amount. in addition there needs to be 2 joins, one, to grab the users first name/last that's in a user table and the award type title.

So my query is looking like this (i know it doesn't work)

SELECT id, userid, awardtypeid, SUM(awardamount) 
FROM awards a
LEFT JOIN userinfo ui ON ui.userid = a,userid
LEFT JOIN awardtypes ON awardtypesid = a.awardtypeid
GROUP BY userid

Is this even possible?

Answer 1

You probably want

SELECT userid, 
       awardtypeid, 
       SUM(awardamount) 
FROM   awards a 
       LEFT JOIN userinfo ui 
         ON ui.userid = a.userid 
       LEFT JOIN awardtypes 
         ON awardtypesid = a.awardtypeid 
GROUP  BY userid, 
          awardtypeid 

or

SELECT userid, 
       SUM(awardamount) 
FROM   awards a 
       LEFT JOIN userinfo ui 
         ON ui.userid = a.userid 
       LEFT JOIN awardtypes 
         ON awardtypesid = a.awardtypeid 
GROUP  BY userid

This drops the id Column (probably not what you want to group on)

In the first case I included the awardtypeid in the select but this means you must also add that to the group by.