Re: SQL question, SELECT DISTINCT

[Stephen E. Bacher]

I had a similar problem, but my criteria for selecting the
value of "f1" was different; it's a date field and I wanted
only the rows with the most recent date value in that field,
so only the "latest" of otherwise identical entries got inserted.

I ended up doing something like this:

create temporary table temp_table (
 t_f1 date,
 t_f2 varchar(100) unique,
 t_f3 varchar(100) unique
);

insert ignore into temp_table
 select f1,f2,f3 from new_table
 order by f1 desc;

insert into original_table
 select * from temp_table;

If there is a better way to do this, I would like to
know about it.

 - seb