Distinct Count?

Databases
1

In my table, there are 3 records but only two distinct Articles…


section		dimension	subsection	article
--------	----------	-----------	--------
finance		seasonal	tax-season	5-tax-shelters-you-need-to-know
finance		featured	tax-season	5-tax-shelters-you-need-to-know
finance		seasonal	tax-season	what-is-eftps

How do I write a COUNT query for MySQL that will return “2” instead of “3”?

(The query should be keying off of the “article” column, because the other columns could be anything and are not relevant.)

Thanks,

Debbie

2

SQL COUNT() Function

3 seconds on google, girl

3

Sorry, I was trying…


SELECT DISTINCT COUNT(article)

Debbie

4

well, you could debug that attempt this way –

COUNT(article) will give you one value, and then DISTINCT will make sure that it’s unique

:slight_smile:

5

Hindsight is always 20/20…

I thought maybe I had to use a GROUP BY thingy…

Debbie

6

select article, count(distinct(article)) from table group by article

7

oh my goodness, jack… no

if you group by article, the result will contain one row per article

guess what the distinct count of articles is gonna be for each article

that’s right… 1

GROUP BY is ~not~ appropriate for this problem

8

My mistaken, didn’t check the requirement clearly.