Re: NEED SQL HELP PLEASE, SELECT DISTINCT QUESTION

Dear Zig, Use group by, as in select colA, colB, colC from yourtable group by 1,2,3; Check out the tutorial - one of the best pieces of documentation Informix has done for beginning dbas and sqlers. Hope this helps, Nick At 11:31 AM 10/2/98 -0400, zigzag wrote: >I have a table which contains several columns. I would like to retrieve >the rows from this table, but remove duplicates based on one column >only. > >For example: > >Row# Col A Col B Col C >1 cat AA BB >2 cat BB CC >3 dog CC DD >4 hat DD EE >5 dog EE FF > >I want to select rows so that they are unique on Col A only, so the set >returned would only >contain rows, 1,3 and 4. > >If I was writing this Select in my own language it would be something >like this: >"Select ColA, ColB, ColC from table where ColA is unique." > >Of course if I only want ColA, it's easy: >"Select distinct ColA from table;" > >Why am I having such a hard time with this seemingly easy chore? >ZZ > >Please reply via email and newsgroup > > > ********************* Nick Nobbe NLS/BPH Library of Congress nnob@loc.gov