Thread: Re: DISTINCT ON not working... RESOLVED

Re: DISTINCT ON not working... RESOLVED

From
"Phillip Smith"
Date:
This has been resolved -- although I still think it may be a bug in
Postgres.

I'm confused as hell, it's Friday, and it's hot though... So I'll have to
think about it over the weekend and let you know if I can make sense of it.

Thanks all for your suggestions.

Cheers,
~p


-----Original Message-----
From: Phillip Smith [mailto:phillip.smith@weatherbeeta.com.au]
Sent: Tuesday, 20 February 2007 09:25
To: 'pgsql-sql@postgresql.org'
Subject: DISTINCT ON not working...?

Hi all,

Strange one - I have a nightly export / import routine that exports from one
database and imports to another. Has been working fine for several months,
but last night it died on a unique constraint.

To cut out all the details, the code that is causing the problem:       SELECT  DISTINCT ON (ean)               code,
           CASE WHEN ean IS NULL OR valid_barcode(ean) = false THEN 
null ELSE ean END AS ean       FROM    TMPTABLE       WHERE   code NOT IN (SELECT code FROM stock_deleted)        AND
ean IS NOT NULL 

That is the code that generates the error on the unique constraint against
the ean column.

If I play with that and run this:SELECT  DISTINCT ON (ean)               CASE WHEN ean IS NULL OR valid_barcode(ean) =
falseTHEN 
null ELSE ean END AS ean,        count(*)       FROM    TMPTABLE       WHERE   code NOT IN (SELECT code FROM
stock_deleted)       AND    ean IS NOT NULL  GROUP BY ean 

I get a several thousand rows returned, all with a count(*) of 1, except one
row:3246576919422    2

DISTINCT ON should eliminate one of those rows that is making that 2 - as I
said, it's been working fine for several months, and it is still doing it
correctly for approximately 100 other rows that have duplicate ean codes.

Can anyone give me a hand to work out why this one is doubling up?!

Cheers,
~p


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