Which clause is often used to group rows that share a common field value?

The GROUP BY clause is specifically designed to aggregate data based on one or more common field values. When working with SQL and processes in SAS, you often need to summarize or analyze data that shares certain attributes. The GROUP BY clause allows you to create subsets of data based on unique values of specified columns, enabling you to perform aggregate functions such as COUNT, SUM, AVG, etc., on those subsets.

For example, if you have sales data that you want to analyze by region, you can use GROUP BY to group all the sales records for each region together. This way, you can summarize total sales for each region instead of dealing with the entire dataset as a whole.

In contrast, the WHERE clause is used for filtering records before any grouping occurs. ORDER BY sorts the final results but does not influence how rows are grouped. The HAVING clause is similar to the WHERE clause but is specifically used to filter records after the grouping process has taken place. Thus, the GROUP BY clause is essential for performing group-related aggregations effectively.