I have a table which has more than 100 columns, in normal case the contract_id should be unique in this table, but sometimes there are duplicate values. I use this SQL statement to retrieve data from this table:
select distinct contract_id, col1, col2,...colM
from the_table;
but I found contract_id values, I know there should be some values are different in the same column(s), can I have a way to find out all these columns which have different value result in I saw duplicate contract_id even though I use distinct, because there are lots of fields and only a few columns have different values. It is difficult to compare each column one by one manually.
Try something along
SELECT contract_id
FROM the_table
GROUP BY contract_id
HAVING COUNT(contract_id)>1;
or
WITH NumberedRows AS
(
SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER(PARTITION BY contract_id ORDER BY(SELECT NULL)) AS RowNumber
,*
FROM the_table
)
SELECT *
FROM NumberedRows
WHERE RowNumber>1;
The first will show you all the contract_id values, which occur at least twice, the second will show you all the rows you might want to manipulate (delete/change).
attention: I used SELECT NULL in the ORDER BY of the OVER() clause. It is very important to use a fitting ORDER BY clause here. This will be responsible for Which row gets the number 1 and which rows get increasing numbers and will show up in the result due to >1?
Related
I have an interesting issue.
I inherited a sloppy database with a table that has duplicate rows. However, they are not exact duplicates due to one column(a text column).
Here is an example:
TestID TestDescription Cost
115893hc127aaq Etiology • Understand the causes of acute pancreatitis $10
115893hc127aaq Etiology • Understand the causes of acute pancreatitis $10
115893hc127aaq Etiology • Understand the causes of acute pancreatitis $10
You can see that all the data except the 'TestDescription' is identical.
There are 1000's of rows like this where there might be 2 or 3 duplicate rows with minor spacing or spelling issues in 'TestDescription'
Because of this, using DISTINCT won't work.
I want to SELECT all rows but only get one row for each TestID...lets say the first one, then ignore the rest.
I tried SELECT DISTINCT *
But I can't do this using DISTINCT because TestDescription contains minor differences between rows.
SELECT DISTINCT TestID works, but that only returns TestID and I need to see all columns.
Is there a way of doing this in Sql Server 2012?
Thanks!
One approach uses row_number():
select *
from (
select t.*, row_number() over(partition by testid order by (select null)) rn
from mytable t
) t
where rn = 1
This assumes that you want one row per testid, as your question suggests.
You did not tell which column you want to use to break the ties, and I am unsure there is actually one, so I odered by (select null). This is not a deterministic order by clause, so consequent executions of the query might not always select the same row from a given duplicate group.
Azure SQL Server 2019.
We have a table Table1 with over 100 columns of differing types of nvarchar data, all of which are allowed NULL values, and where there could be anywhere from 1 to 100 columns populated in a given record. I need to formulate a query that returns the rows ranked by how many columns have values in them, in descending order.
I started going down a road of using DATALENGTH and having to type out the name of every single column, but I can only imagine there has to be a more efficient way. Assuming the column names are column1, column2, column3 etc, how would I accomplish this?
How about a lateral join that unpivots the columns to rows? This requires enumerating the columns just once, like so:
select t.*, c.cnt
from mytable t
cross apply (
select count(*) cnt
from (values (t.column1), (t.column2), (t.column3)) x(col)
where col is not null
) c
order by c.cnt desc
I've been using the following inherited query where I'm trying to delete duplicate rows and I'm getting some unexpected results when first running it as a SELECT - I believe it has something to do with my lack of understanding of the Partition part of the statement:
WITH CTE AS(
SELECT [Id],
[Url],
[Identifier],
[Name],
[Entity],
[DOB],
RN = ROW_NUMBER()OVER(PARTITION BY Name ORDER BY Name)
FROM Data.Statistics
where Id = 2170
)
DELETE FROM CTE WHERE RN > 1
Can someone help me understand exactly what I'm doing with the Partition BY Name part of this? This doesn't limit the query in any way to only looking for duplicates in the Name field, correct? I need to ensure that it's looking for records where all 5 of the fields inside the CTE definition are the same for a record to be considered a duplicate.
ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY Name ORDER BY Name) doesn't make a lot of sense. You wouldn't ORDER BY the same thing you used in PARTITION BY since it will be the same value for everything in the partition, making the ORDER BY part useless.
Basically the CTE part of this query is saying to split the matching rows (those with [Id] = 2170) temporarily into groups for each distinct name, and within each group of rows with the same name, order those by name (which are obviously all the same value) and then return the row number within that sequence group as RN. Unique names will all have a row number of 1, because there is only one row with that name. Duplicate names will have row numbers 1, 2, 3, and so on. The order of those rows is undefined in this case because of the silly ORDER BY clause, but if you changed the ORDER BY to something meaningful, the row numbers would follow that sequence.
I need to retrieve all rows from a table where 2 columns combined are all different. So I want all the sales that do not have any other sales that happened on the same day for the same price. The sales that are unique based on day and price will get updated to an active status.
So I'm thinking:
UPDATE sales
SET status = 'ACTIVE'
WHERE id IN (SELECT DISTINCT (saleprice, saledate), id, count(id)
FROM sales
HAVING count = 1)
But my brain hurts going any farther than that.
SELECT DISTINCT a,b,c FROM t
is roughly equivalent to:
SELECT a,b,c FROM t GROUP BY a,b,c
It's a good idea to get used to the GROUP BY syntax, as it's more powerful.
For your query, I'd do it like this:
UPDATE sales
SET status='ACTIVE'
WHERE id IN
(
SELECT id
FROM sales S
INNER JOIN
(
SELECT saleprice, saledate
FROM sales
GROUP BY saleprice, saledate
HAVING COUNT(*) = 1
) T
ON S.saleprice=T.saleprice AND s.saledate=T.saledate
)
If you put together the answers so far, clean up and improve, you would arrive at this superior query:
UPDATE sales
SET status = 'ACTIVE'
WHERE (saleprice, saledate) IN (
SELECT saleprice, saledate
FROM sales
GROUP BY saleprice, saledate
HAVING count(*) = 1
);
Which is much faster than either of them. Nukes the performance of the currently accepted answer by factor 10 - 15 (in my tests on PostgreSQL 8.4 and 9.1).
But this is still far from optimal. Use a NOT EXISTS (anti-)semi-join for even better performance. EXISTS is standard SQL, has been around forever (at least since PostgreSQL 7.2, long before this question was asked) and fits the presented requirements perfectly:
UPDATE sales s
SET status = 'ACTIVE'
WHERE NOT EXISTS (
SELECT FROM sales s1 -- SELECT list can be empty for EXISTS
WHERE s.saleprice = s1.saleprice
AND s.saledate = s1.saledate
AND s.id <> s1.id -- except for row itself
)
AND s.status IS DISTINCT FROM 'ACTIVE'; -- avoid empty updates. see below
db<>fiddle here
Old sqlfiddle
Unique key to identify row
If you don't have a primary or unique key for the table (id in the example), you can substitute with the system column ctid for the purpose of this query (but not for some other purposes):
AND s1.ctid <> s.ctid
Every table should have a primary key. Add one if you didn't have one, yet. I suggest a serial or an IDENTITY column in Postgres 10+.
Related:
In-order sequence generation
Auto increment table column
How is this faster?
The subquery in the EXISTS anti-semi-join can stop evaluating as soon as the first dupe is found (no point in looking further). For a base table with few duplicates this is only mildly more efficient. With lots of duplicates this becomes way more efficient.
Exclude empty updates
For rows that already have status = 'ACTIVE' this update would not change anything, but still insert a new row version at full cost (minor exceptions apply). Normally, you do not want this. Add another WHERE condition like demonstrated above to avoid this and make it even faster:
If status is defined NOT NULL, you can simplify to:
AND status <> 'ACTIVE';
The data type of the column must support the <> operator. Some types like json don't. See:
How to query a json column for empty objects?
Subtle difference in NULL handling
This query (unlike the currently accepted answer by Joel) does not treat NULL values as equal. The following two rows for (saleprice, saledate) would qualify as "distinct" (though looking identical to the human eye):
(123, NULL)
(123, NULL)
Also passes in a unique index and almost anywhere else, since NULL values do not compare equal according to the SQL standard. See:
Create unique constraint with null columns
OTOH, GROUP BY, DISTINCT or DISTINCT ON () treat NULL values as equal. Use an appropriate query style depending on what you want to achieve. You can still use this faster query with IS NOT DISTINCT FROM instead of = for any or all comparisons to make NULL compare equal. More:
How to delete duplicate rows without unique identifier
If all columns being compared are defined NOT NULL, there is no room for disagreement.
The problem with your query is that when using a GROUP BY clause (which you essentially do by using distinct) you can only use columns that you group by or aggregate functions. You cannot use the column id because there are potentially different values. In your case there is always only one value because of the HAVING clause, but most RDBMS are not smart enough to recognize that.
This should work however (and doesn't need a join):
UPDATE sales
SET status='ACTIVE'
WHERE id IN (
SELECT MIN(id) FROM sales
GROUP BY saleprice, saledate
HAVING COUNT(id) = 1
)
You could also use MAX or AVG instead of MIN, it is only important to use a function that returns the value of the column if there is only one matching row.
If your DBMS doesn't support distinct with multiple columns like this:
select distinct(col1, col2) from table
Multi select in general can be executed safely as follows:
select distinct * from (select col1, col2 from table ) as x
As this can work on most of the DBMS and this is expected to be faster than group by solution as you are avoiding the grouping functionality.
I want to select the distinct values from one column 'GrondOfLucht' but they should be sorted in the order as given in the column 'sortering'. I cannot get the distinct values of just one column using
Select distinct GrondOfLucht,sortering
from CorWijzeVanAanleg
order by sortering
It will also give the column 'sortering' and because 'GrondOfLucht' AND 'sortering' is not unique, the result will be ALL rows.
use the GROUP to select the records of 'GrondOfLucht' in the order given by 'sortering
SELECT GrondOfLucht
FROM dbo.CorWijzeVanAanleg
GROUP BY GrondOfLucht, sortering
ORDER BY MIN(sortering)
I've multipe uniond statements in MSSQL Server that is very hard to find a unique column among the result.
I need to have a unique value per each row, so I've used ROW_NUMBER() function.
This result set is being copied to other place (actually a SOLR index).
In the next time I will run the same query, I need to pick only the newly added rows.
So, I need to confirm that, the newly added rows will be numbered afterward the last row_number value of the last time.
In other words, Is the ROW_NUMBER functions orders the results with the insertion order - suppose I don't adding any ORDER BY clause?
If no, (as I think), Is there any alternatives?
Thanks.
Without seeing the sql I can only give the general answer that MS Sql does not guarantee the order of select statements without an order clause so that would mean that the row_number may not be the insertion order.
I guess you can do something like this..
;WITH
cte
AS
(
SELECT * , rn = ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY SomeColumn)
FROM
(
/* Your Union Queries here*/
)q
)
INSERT INTO Destination_Table
SELECT * FROM
CTE LEFT JOIN Destination_Table
ON CTE.Refrencing_Column = Destination_Table.Refrencing_Column
WHERE Destination_Table.Refrencing_Column IS NULL
I would suggest you consider 'timestamping' the row with the time it was inserted. Or adding an identity column to the table.
But what it sounds like you want to do is get current max id and then add the row_number to it.
Select col1, col2, mid + row_number() over(order by smt) id
From (
Select col1, col2, (select max(id) from tbl) mid
From query
) t