The distinct statment - details

  • Hello All,

    I'm a bit of an SQL novice so please don't laugh.

    I have a database with a load of company names in

    Some of these companies do more than one thing (ie. painting and decorating and plumbing) consequently they appear twice in the database.

    I want to do a query and extract only unique companies only once

    If I use DISTINCT then I think it filters on all of the columns I select

    i.e.

    SELECT DISTINCT Name, Address, BusinessType, Contact

    FROM database

    To the best of my knowledge this will qualify a record as distinct if all the columns match (Name, Address, BusinessType, Contact) - am i right?

    I want to output all the columns but only check for being DISTINCT on 'Name'

    How do you do that?

    Thanks in advance.C

  • How about something like

    SELECT TOP 1 A.[Name], A.Address, A.BusinessType, A.Contact

    FROM tblCompanies A

      INNER JOIN (SELECT DISTINCT [Name] FROM tblCompanies) B ON A.[Name] = B.[Name]

    Hopefully this should get you close



    Good Hunting!

    AJ Ahrens


    webmaster@kritter.net

  • Cheers AJ

    I'll give it a wirl

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