How can we use MySQL SUM() function?

MySQL SUM function is used to find out the sum of a field in various records. To understand SUM() function, consider an ‘employee_tbl’ table, which is having 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, suppose based on the above table you want to calculate the total of all the dialy_typing_pages, then you can do so by using the following command −

mysql> SELECT SUM(daily_typing_pages)
    -> FROM employee_tbl;
+-------------------------+
| SUM(daily_typing_pages) |
+-------------------------+
|         1610            |
+-------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)