The SQL SELECT DISTINCT Statement

The SELECT DISTINCT statement is used to return only distinct (different) values.

Select all the different city from the "Employee" table:

 SELECT DISTINCT   City FROM  employee;

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In a table, a column contains many duplicate values; but it show only the list of different (distinct) values.

SELECT DISTINCT   column1, column2, ...
  FROM  table_name;

SELECT Example Without DISTINCT

If you do not use the DISTINCT keyword, the SQL statement returns the "City" value from all the records of the "employee" table:

SELECT  City FROM  employee;

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This employee table is used for the above examples:

By using the DISTINCT keyword in a function called COUNT , we can return the number of different cities.

SELECT COUNT(  DISTINCT   City) FROM  employee;

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For Microsoft Access databases.

SELECT Count (*)  AS  DistinctCity 
 FROM 
(SELECT DISTINCT City FROM employee);

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You will learn about the COUNT function later in this tutorial..