EasySQL challenge #75GROUP BYMIN

Find the Lowest Price in Each Category

Return each product category with its cheapest price.

The challenge runs on the SQLabHub practice database (SQLite) and uses the products table. You can solve it in the browser, with nothing to install.

Solve This SQL Challenge

The task

Find minimum product price per category.

A correct answer returns 10 rows with 2 columns: category, MIN(price).

Tables used in this challenge

`products` 120 rows

id INTEGER (PK) · name TEXT · category TEXT · price REAL · cost REAL · stock INTEGER · sku TEXT · status TEXT · rating REAL · review_count INTEGER

First 3 rows of the products table
id	name	category	price	cost	stock	sku	status	rating	review_count
1	Play Kitchen Deluxe	Toys	1786.38	589.51	257	SKU-000001	active	4	57
2	Micro-Cut Paper Shredder 8-Sheet	Office Supplies	907.93	281.46	131	SKU-000002	active	2.5	447
3	4K Dual Dash Camera	Automotive	568.89	204.8	176	SKU-000003	active	4.1	29

The first rows of each table are shown. See how all the tables relate on the database schema page.

Expected output

Expected output of the challenge
category	MIN(price)
Automotive	73.64
Books	89.76
Clothing	281.33
Electronics	261.81
Food & Beverage	104.33
Health & Beauty	160.75
Home & Garden	115.69
Office Supplies	123.26
Sports & Outdoors	35.76
Toys	154.36

The complete result: 10 rows. This is the output of the model solution on the practice database. The task does not fix a sort order, so your rows may come back in a different order.

What you practise

Summarising many rows into one value with COUNT, SUM, AVG, MIN or MAX
Grouping rows with GROUP BY to get one result row per group

Hint and approach

Try the challenge first. Open these only when you need them.

Show the hint

GROUP BY category

Show the step-by-step approach

How the model solution is built, in the order the database evaluates it:

Read from the products table.
Group the rows by category, so the result has one row for each value.
For each group, compute MIN(price).

Model solution

Checking your session…

What to watch for

One row comes back per category. Discontinued products are included unless you filter them out first, so the lowest price may belong to something that is no longer sold.

GROUP BY. Every selected column must either be in GROUP BY or sit inside an aggregate. SQLite accepts other columns and returns an arbitrary value for them; most databases raise an error.
Aggregate functions. Aggregates skip NULLs. AVG divides by the number of non-NULL values and COUNT(column) can be smaller than COUNT(*).