If there are a lot of data points, you can also [group ranges together][1] like this:



    SELECT FLOOR(grade/5.00)*5 As Grade, 
           COUNT(*) AS [Grade Count]
    FROM TableName
    GROUP BY FLOOR(Grade/5.00)*5
    ORDER BY 1

Additionally, if you wanted to label the full range, you can get the floor and ceiling ahead of time with a CTE. 



    With GradeRanges As (
      SELECT FLOOR(Score/5.00)*5     As GradeFloor, 
             FLOOR(Score/5.00)*5 + 4 As GradeCeiling
      FROM TableName
    )
    SELECT GradeFloor,
           CONCAT(GradeFloor, ' to ', GradeCeiling) AS GradeRange,
           COUNT(*) AS [Grade Count]
    FROM GradeRanges
    GROUP BY GradeFloor, CONCAT(GradeFloor, ' to ', GradeCeiling)
    ORDER BY GradeFloor

**Note**: In some SQL engines, you can `GROUP BY` an Ordinal Column Index, but with MS SQL, if you want it in the `SELECT` statement, you're going to need to group by it also, hence copying the Range into the Group Expression as well.

**Option 2**: You could use [case statements to selectively count values into arbitrary bins and then unpivot them][2] to get a row by row count of included values

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180205094300/https://www.wagonhq.com/sql-tutorial/creating-a-histogram-sql "ARCHIVE of https:&#47;&#47;www.wagonhq.com/sql-tutorial/creating-a-histogram-sql"
[2]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/52105218/1366033

Let's say I have a database column 'grade' like this:

    |grade|
    |    1|
    |    2|
    |    1|
    |    3|
    |    4|
    |    5|

Is there a non-trivial way in SQL to generate a histogram like this?

    |2,1,1,1,1,0|

where 2 means the grade 1 occurs twice, the 1s mean grades {2..5} occur once and 0 means grade 6 does not occur at all.

I don't mind if the histogram is one row per count. 

If that matters, the database is SQL Server accessed by a perl CGI through unixODBC/FreeTDS.

**EDIT:** Thanks for your quick replies! It is okay if non-existing values (like grade 6 in the example above) do not occur as long as I can make out which histogram value belongs to which grade.