title: MYSQL query - getting totals by month
body: <p><a href="http://sqlfiddle.com/#!2/6a6b1" rel="noreferrer">http://sqlfiddle.com/#!2/6a6b1</a></p>
  
  <p>The scheme is given above.. all I want to do is get the results as the total of sales/month... the user will enter a start date and end date and I can generate (in PHP) all the month and years for those dates. For example, if I want to know the total number of "sales" for 12 months, I know I can run 12 individual queries with start and end dates, but I want to run only one query where the result will look like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Month     numofsale
  January - 2  
  Feb-1
  March - 23
  Apr - 10
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and so on...</p>
  
  <p>or just a list of sales without the months, I can then pair it to the array of months generated in the PHP ...any ideas...</p>
  
  <p>Edit/schema and data pasted from sqlfiddle.com:</p>
  
  <pre><code>CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `lead_activity2` (
    `lead_activity_id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
    `sp_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
    `act_date` datetime NOT NULL,
    `act_name` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
    PRIMARY KEY (`lead_activity_id`),
    KEY `act_date` (`act_date`),
    KEY `act_name` (`act_name`)
  ) ENGINE=InnoDB  DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1  ;
  
  INSERT INTO `lead_activity2` (`lead_activity_id`, `sp_id`, `act_date`, `act_name`) VALUES
  (1, 5, '2012-10-16 16:05:29', 'sale'),
  (2, 5, '2012-10-16 16:05:29', 'search'),
  (3, 5, '2012-10-16 16:05:29', 'sale'),
  (4, 5, '2012-10-17 16:05:29', 'DNC'),
  (5, 5, '2012-10-17 16:05:29', 'sale'),
  (6, 5, '2012-09-16 16:05:30', 'SCB'),
  (7, 5, '2012-09-16 16:05:30', 'sale'),
  (8, 5, '2012-08-16 16:05:30', 'sale'),
  (9, 5,'2012-08-16 16:05:30', 'sale'),
  (10, 5, '2012-07-16 16:05:30', 'sale');
  </code></pre>