What is a SQL case statement?

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Imagine you are a manager at a retail store, and you’d like to categorize your customers based on their total spending. You want to label them as ‘High,’ ‘Medium,’ or ‘Low’ spenders to target them with personalized marketing campaigns. A SQL CASE statement can be extremely helpful for such a data analysis task. 

A  CASE statement in SQL is a conditional expression that allows you to perform conditional logic in a query. It helps you to create new columns or values based on certain conditions or criteria. 

Think of a CASE statement as a traffic light that changes colors based on specific conditions. When the light is green, cars can move; when it’s red, cars must stop. Similarly, in SQL, a CASE statement helps you control the flow of your query by returning different values based on specific conditions. 

The primary purpose of a CASE statement is to add flexibility to your SQL queries by allowing you to handle different conditions and criteria within a single query. This can simplify complex queries and improve code readability. 

Suppose you want to analyze customer spending and categorize them as ‘High,’ ‘Medium,’ or ‘Low’ based on the total amount spent. Here’s an example of a query that uses a CASE statement: 

In this query, we break down the CASE statement as follows:

  1. SELECT customer_id, total_spent: We select the ‘customer_id’ and ‘total_spent’ columns from the ‘customer_purchases’ table. 
  2. CASE: We start our CASE statement. 
  3. WHEN total_spent >= 1000 THEN ‘High’: If the total spent by a customer is greater than or equal to 1000, we label them as ‘High.’ 
  4. WHEN total_spent >= 500 AND total_spent < 1000 THEN ‘Medium’: If the total spent by a customer is between 500 and 999, we label them as ‘Medium.’ 
  5. ELSE ‘Low’: For all other cases, we label them as ‘Low.’ 
  6. END as spender_category: We end our CASE statement and create a new column called ‘spender_category’ to store the labels.

By using a CASE statement, we can efficiently categorize customers based on their spending habits in a single query, making it easier to analyze and target them with personalized marketing campaigns.

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