Grouping By

I'm doing a group by statement in MySQL, heres some example data.

Name Age
White 20
Black 17
White 22

SELECT * FROM [tblname] GROUP BY Name.

When I do this group by statement, the statement returns the average of the ages rather than the sum of which is need. Do I need to do a loop to get each name and add the total, or is there another way of doing it...by using the SUM statement for example.

Your SQL should be:

SELECT name, SUM(age)
FROM <table_name>
GROUP BY name;

MySQL just chose AVE for you as the default aggregate function to apply to the non-grouped column -- if you want it to do something different, you have to explicitly tell it so.