SQL Server: Counting Inventory Issue (with subquery) - sql

Question

I currently have a query that is going out into an inventory table (of servers), filtering which ones are 'Developer', and producing a list of distinct users from an audit-related table. Essentially, trying to find out who has access to development servers in this particular inventory.
Everything worked until I added the second line, which I commented out in the code below:
select distinct tAudit.[USER_ID]
--, count(tAudit.[USER_ID]) AS [USER_COUNT]
from table_audit as tAudit
where tAudit.inst_name IN (
SELECT (SUBSTRING([Computer Name],0,CHARINDEX('.',[Computer Name],0))) AS INST_NAME
FROM table_server_inventory
WHERE [SQL Server Edition] = 'Developer'
)
order by tAudit.user_id asc
So, the question is: How can I count how many times a particular user appears? Is there a conflict with the fact I am using distinct? There's another query I produced, purely to see if I was on the right track. This is an example:
select tAudit.[USER_ID]
, count(tAudit.[USER_ID]) AS [USER_COUNT]
from table_audit as tAudit
where tAudit.user_id IN ('user_001', 'user_009', 'user_199', 'user_222')
group by tAudit.user_id
And it looked something like this:
USER_ID USER_COUNT
user_001 5
user_009 32
user_199 14
user_222 8
Ideally, when the primary query is working it'll look like the example above, just with dozens more results.
NOTE: The table_audit is actually very large and lists servers and users each time. Example:
COMPUTER_NAME USER_ID
serverAA user_001
serverAA user_009
serverAA user_199
serverAA user_222
serverBB user_001
serverBB user_009
serverCC user_001
serverCC user_199
serverCC user_222

Answer 1

You just want a GROUP BY query, not SELECT DISTINCT:
select tAudit.[USER_ID], count(tAudit.[USER_ID]) AS [USER_COUNT]
from table_audit as tAudit
where tAudit.inst_name IN (
SELECT (SUBSTRING([Computer Name],0,CHARINDEX('.',[Computer Name],0))) AS INST_NAME
FROM table_server_inventory
WHERE [SQL Server Edition] = 'Developer'
)
group by tAudit.[USER_ID]
order by tAudit.user_id asc