[thelist] Weird SELECT DISTINCT error
Luther, Ron
Ron.Luther at hp.com
Fri Dec 16 08:46:35 CST 2005
Matt Warden pointed out that I misread his earlier message:
>>Yes, of course. The stuff that you replaced with a '...'
>>gives the appropriate context to what I was saying:
>>"Actually, you are selecting unique combinations of opp_id
>>and policy_name. If you think about it, since results are
>>returned in rows, it is difficult to see how DISTINCT could
>>operate on only one column."
Hi Matt,
Ooops. Sorry. My bad. I misread that. (Yeah, that
seemed kinda weird coming from you, but <shrug />,
not everybody plays with every odd little db command
all the time.) No slight intended.
Contritely,
RonL.
<tip type="reading carefully" author="RonL.">
Reading carefully isn't just for email.
Sometimes we make assumptions about how a command works
in technology 'e' because we are so familiar with how
it works in 'a', 'b', 'c', and 'd'.
Yesterday I ran into trouble writing an equation to
compute the number of 'working days' between two
arbitrary dates.
I was working in the ZABO flavor of Business Objects
and discovered, (much to my annoyance), that in this
technology the "Min()" function can _only_ be used
as an aggregate function operating on an entire
field of entries ... and cannot be used in the
(relatively common) row level contexts of
'Min(field_1, field_2)' or 'Min(field_1, constant).
Realizing this earlier would have prevented much wasted
time experimenting with 'elegant' solutions.
</tip>
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