Hi,


Please consider this data/table consisting of 3 Columns with the 2nd Column having Duplicate Values (Book Titles here) :

Note:SELECT * FROM Books


Let's Sort the Data/Table on the 2nd Column i.e. book_title:

We see that Book_ID: 3, 7, and 10 above have duplicated values in their respective Book_Title fields.

In the result/output we do want all the 3 Columns (or all the columns of the table) with the condition that if any Book_Title is coming again down the list then only the first one needs to be SELECTed. In other words, we want to exclude duplicate book titles irrespective of what values the other corresponding columns may have.

So, the desired output should look like as follows:


Please Note: In the first table above, the Book IDs 6 and 7 show identical records. But that is not the case with the other records. So, whether 2 or more records are identical or not (DISTINCTROW, in MS Access), we are concerned about a specific column's values and want them to be UNIQUE in our Result/Output. Kind of GROUP BY Query but that would not help us display all the fields/columns.

Do we need some Sub-Query or Join here? Any ideas, gurus?

this looks like homework to me, so I won't say too much, but you do want a GROUP BY to do this.

Yes, I mentioned it already that it does require a GROUP BY query but that alone would not fetch all the columns. Some logic is missing here.

'greatest-n-per-group'
and/or 'having'

Yes, so you just ask for the remaining columns as well, selecting appropriately from each grouped set to find an appropriate value.