The very next ask will be "order the zipcodes by number of customers" at which point you'll be back to aggregations, which is where you should have started

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wvbdmp 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Anti-Patterns You Should Avoid: overengineering for potential future requirements. Are there real-life cases where you should design with the future in mind? Yes. Are there real-life cases where DISTINCT is the best choice by whatever metric you prioritize at the time? Also yes.

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RHSeeger 15 hours ago | parent [-]

> 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.

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dleeftink 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Partly 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 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I 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.

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majormajor 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Here we start to get close to analytics sql vs application sql, and I think that's a whole separate beast itself with different patterns and anti-patterns.

	▲	bandrami 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Ah, yeah, you beat me to it. I do reporting, not applications.

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bandrami 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I do reporting, not application development. If somebody wants to know different information I'd write a different query.

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kristjansson 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Whole seconds will have been wasted!

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sql_nitpicker 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

distinct seems like an aggregation to me

	▲	12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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edoceo 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

count(id) group by post_code order by 1