# Calculating Running Total in SQL

While it's easy enough to compute the total of selected rows, it's far more interesting to compute a running total over time. A running total is the summation of a sequence of numbers which is updated each time a number is added to the sequence, by adding the value of the new number to the previous running total.

For example, if your dataset is a "users_joined" table like so:

date user_id
2016-01-01 1
2016-01-02 2
2016-01-02 3
2016-01-02 4
2016-01-02 5
2016-01-02 6
2016-01-02 7
2016-01-03 8
... ...

You can compute the total number of users joined in a day like this:

select date, count(user_id) from users_joined
group by date order by date;


Which will give you a result like this:

date count
2016-01-01 1
2016-01-02 6
2016-01-03 1
... ...

If you wanted to compute a running total (or cumulative sum) of the counts, you can use a SQL window function to achieve that:

select date,
count(user_id) as count,
sum(count(user_id)) over (order by date) as running_total
from users_joined
group by date
order by date;

date count running_total
2016-01-01 1 1
2016-01-02 6 7
2016-01-03 1 8
... ... ...

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