Tutorial on averaging using the AVG function in MySQL

The AVG function of MySQL is used to find the average of fields in various records.

To understand AVG functionality consider the EMPLOYEE_TBL table with the following records:

mysql> SELECT * FROM employee_tbl;
+------+------+------------+--------------------+
| id  | name | work_date | daily_typing_pages |
+------+------+------------+--------------------+
|  1 | John | 2007-01-24 |        250 |
|  2 | Ram | 2007-05-27 |        220 |
|  3 | Jack | 2007-05-06 |        170 |
|  3 | Jack | 2007-04-06 |        100 |
|  4 | Jill | 2007-04-06 |        220 |
|  5 | Zara | 2007-06-06 |        300 |
|  5 | Zara | 2007-02-06 |        350 |
+------+------+------------+--------------------+
7 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Now, assuming that you want to calculate the average of all dialy_typing_pages based on the table above, you can do so by using the following command:

mysql> SELECT AVG(daily_typing_pages)
  -> FROM employee_tbl;
+-------------------------+
| AVG(daily_typing_pages) |
+-------------------------+
|        230.0000 |
+-------------------------+
1 row in set (0.03 sec)

You can average the various records set using the GROUP BY clause. The following example will take the average of all relevant records to 1 person, each person's average page of typed paper.

mysql> SELECT name, AVG(daily_typing_pages)
  -> FROM employee_tbl GROUP BY name;
+------+-------------------------+
| name | AVG(daily_typing_pages) |
+------+-------------------------+
| Jack |        135.0000 |
| Jill |        220.0000 |
| John |        250.0000 |
| Ram |        220.0000 |
| Zara |        325.0000 |
+------+-------------------------+
5 rows in set (0.20 sec)