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> Are there real-life cases where DISTINCT is the best choice by whatever metric you prioritize at the time Indeed, along that line, I would say that DISTINCT
by RHSeeger 1y ago
> Are there real-life cases where DISTINCT is the best choice by whatever metric you prioritize at the time
Indeed, along that line, I would say that DISTINCT can be used to convey intent... and doing that in code is important.
- I want to know the zipcodes we have customers in - DISTINCT
- I want to know how many customers we have in each zipcode - aggregates
Can you do the first with the second? Sure.. but the first makes it clear what your goal is.
- dleeftink 1y agoPartly in jest, but maybe we need a NON-DISTINCT signaller to convey the inverse and return duplicate values only. SOMEWHAT-DISTINCT with a fuzzy threshold would also be useful.
- RHSeeger 1y agoI hear you. It's not all _that_ uncommon for me to query for "things with more than one instance". Although, to be fair, it's more common for me to that when grep/sort/uniqing logs on the command line.