order by, but eliminating dupes - Mailing list pgsql-novice

From LH
Subject order by, but eliminating dupes
Date
Msg-id 3F56A8FC.451EC60@geekhouse.no-ip.com
Whole thread Raw
Responses Re: order by, but eliminating dupes
Re: order by, but eliminating dupes
List pgsql-novice
So lets say I got a table A(x,y,z, Q) ordered by column Q, with contents
like so:

x      y      z    Q
------------------------
21    5      x     1
21    5      x     2
43   10      t     3
1     2       a     5
43   10      t     10
21    5      x     50

what I would like is to take the results of this query, and maintaining
the order, only list x, y, z , AND
not list any duplicates.

So the result I'd want after getting this query would be:

x     y     z
----------------
21    5    x
43   10    t
1      2    a

So I'm pulling the results as they come along, and ignore any subsequent
dupes.

I don't know if this is even possible. I've tried combinations of SELECT
DISTINCT, GROUP BY, and others
with
no luck. The best I could do was to do the order by in a subquery, then
do a SELECT UNIQUE on the subquery.
But that kills the order of the subquery. I've tried group by x,y,z but
then I can't ORDER BY Q.

- L


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