All I need is a SQL statement that does the following 

With SQL, how can you identify the Person with the largest total
amount of money spent and return their FirstName, LastName, Address
components, and the total amount of all their transactions?

your tables 
Person, address, transactions

Person has these fields PKPERSON, PREFIX, FIRSTNAME, LASTNAME, SUFFIX, GENDER

Address has these fields PKADDRESS, PKPERSON (FK), ADDRESS1, ADDRESS2,
CITY, STATE, ZIP, PLUS4

TRANSACTIONS has these fields PKTRANSACTION,PKPERSON (FK),
TRANSACTION_DATE, TRANSACTION_AMOUNT, TRANSACTION_TYPE

Where I am running into trouble is totaling each persons total
individual purchases,if you could help me out with that part I think I
could take it from there.

I am in a crunch for time so a tip will be left if this is answered quickly

Hello Terry,

The ideal solution to your question involves three joins across your
tables using the primary/foreign key relationships that you've
indicated. The result is then grouped by the fields that have the same
values (ie. everything with the exception of the sum of transactions).
To obtain the highest spender, we first sort the result based on the
aggregated sum of their transactions, and then retrieve the first
record in the result.

Here is the query you requested:

SELECT TOP 1 p.Prefix, 
	p.FirstName, 
	p.LastName,
	p.Suffix, 
	p.Gender,
	a.Address1,
	a.Address2,
	a.City,
	a.State,
	a.Zip,
	a.Plus4,
	t.Transaction_Date,
	SUM(t.Transaction_Amount) As TotalTransactions,
	t.Transaction_Type	
FROM Person p
JOIN Address a ON a.PkPerson = p.PkPerson
JOIN Transaction t ON t.PkPerson = p.PkPerson
GROUP BY p.Prefix,
	p.FirstName, 
	p.LastName,
	p.Suffix, 
	p.Gender,
	a.Address1,
	a.Address2,
	a.City,
	a.State,
	a.Zip,
	a.Plus4,
	t.Transaction_Date,
	t.Transaction_Type
ORDER BY TotalTransactions DESC

In general, using JOIN statements to connect tables is preferred
rather than using subselect statements. This is to increase
performance as well as maintainability.

As a side note, depending on your environment, the "TOP 1" keyword may
not be recognized. To overcome this, you can remove it and preceed
your select statement with:

SET ROWCOUNT 1

This will limit the result of the next statement to only one record.
Since the query is sorting by total transaction amount in descending
order, you will get the record you are interested in.

Hopefully this gives you a better understanding of how to perform this
type of query. If you are unsure about anything above, please post a
clarification and I will respond promptly.

Cheers,

answerguru-ga

I do web development in MySQL and PHP, thus I understand a bulk of
SQL, but I'm not sure if this solution works across different SQL
databases.

Regardless, this is how it would be done in MySQL with subselects, and
at a minimum, it should offer you a clue.

SELECT
 person.pkperson,
 person.firstname,
 person.lastname,
 (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM transactions WHERE transactions.pkperson =
person.pkperson) AS purchasecount,
 (SELECT SUM(transaction_amount) FROM transactions WHERE
transactions.pkperson = person.pkperson) AS totalpurchasevalue
FROM
person
WHERE
pkperson = $pkperson

Sorry for the PHP variable at the end, but I'm not sure how you plan
to specify the ID, and I'm just used to PHP.

I could write a solution with joins as well, but that would be really
annoying. Hopefully, you can perform subselects.

-Frank Crook

That's close forzan-ga, however Terry appeared to be after the single
highest spender, not a particular person based on ID.

answerguru-ga