Lowest and Highest Product Price — Aggregate Functions in SQL

The problem

Brightlane's merchandising team is preparing a pricing review and needs to understand the spread of prices across the current catalogue.

Write a query to return the lowest and highest product prices in a single row.

Assumptions:

The products table contains every product in Brightlane's catalogue.
The price column is each product's unit list price.

Output:

A single row with two columns, min_price and max_price.

Schema · ecommerce 5 tables

categories

id integer

name text

parent_id? integer

products

id integer

name text

category_id integer

price numeric

stock_qty integer

attributes? jsonb

order_items

id integer

order_id integer

product_id integer

quantity integer

unit_price numeric

customers

id integer

name text

email text

city? text

country text

created_at timestamptz

is_active boolean

orders

id integer

customer_id integer

ordered_at timestamptz

status text

total_amount numeric

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Worked solution Try it yourself first

Solution query

SELECT
  MIN(price) AS min_price,
  MAX(price) AS max_price
FROM
  products

The shape

MIN and MAX walk the same column from opposite ends, returning the cheapest and most expensive products as two labeled columns in a single row. For Brightlane's current catalog, that's 12.99 to 1999 — a wide enough spread that the merchandising team can see the pricing range at a glance.

Clause by clause

MIN(price) AS min_price returns the smallest price value in the products table. PostgreSQL scans the column, holds onto the smallest value it has seen, updates that value any time it finds a smaller one, and returns whatever it has at the end. One column, one row, one number.
MAX(price) AS max_price does the same thing from the opposite end — same scan, same logic, opposite extreme.
Both aggregates run against the same FROM products source in a single pass. The comma between them places both results in the same output row, side by side. That's exactly the shape a pricing review needs to read the spread at a glance, without running two separate queries and stitching the results.
MIN and MAX skip NULL values the same way SUM does. The extremes are computed over real values only; a missing price doesn't get picked as the minimum just because nothing seems smaller.

You practiced computing two boundary aggregates in one query — MIN and MAX side by side give the full range of a column in a single row. The recurring shape behind any "spread," "range," or "floor and ceiling" question.

Return the lowest and highest product prices in a single row

The shape

Clause by clause

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