Expert: Donald Hammond - 10/15/2008

Question
I am running a query on a large database. I am wanting the query to return the person's name listed in the database. However, the database contains multiple records for each person's name. I am wanting the query, or the table, to display each name only once, although several records may return the same name.  

Answer
The DISTINCT clause allows you to remove duplicates from the result set. The DISTINCT clause can only be used with select statements.

The syntax for the DISTINCT clause is:

SELECT DISTINCT columns
FROM tables
WHERE predicates;

Example #1

Let's take a look at a very simple example.

SELECT DISTINCT city
FROM suppliers;

This SQL statement would return all unique cities from the suppliers table.

Example #2

The DISTINCT clause can be used with more than one field.

For example:

SELECT DISTINCT city, state
FROM suppliers;

This select statement would return each unique city and state combination. In this case, the distinct applies to each field listed after the DISTINCT keyword.

Hope this helps.
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