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adoner
Starting Member
1 Post |
 Posted - 2005-06-09 : 13:39:32
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| Does anyone know of a workaround for ordering a row by a field that is not returned in the select list? I get the error message:SELECT DISTINCT column1, column2 FROM table1 ORDER BY column3 is what I need to do. Thanks in advance. |
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jsmith8858
Dr. Cross Join
7423 Posts |
Posted - 2005-06-09 : 13:44:48
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There is a reason why you can't do it ... consider:Col1 Col2 Col3---- ---- ----Boston MA 1Boston MA 4 Brookline MA 2New York NY 3 How should this list be ordered if it was legal to say:select distinct Col1, Col2 from Tbl order by Col3?? What results do you think it should return? Should Boston be in the beginning (col3 = 1) or at the end (col3 = 4) ? It logicaly makes no sense what you are trying to do w/o altering the SELECT statement to make it very clear, most likely using GROUP BY instead of DISTINCT.Advice -- stay away from DISTINCT in all but the rarest cases. Stick with GROUP BY. If you are not sure how GROUP BY works, it's a great time to look it up and experiment and get the hang of it. - Jeff |
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SELECT DISTINCT with ORDER BY