sqlduplicates

Finding duplicate values in a SQL table


It's easy to find duplicates with one field:

SELECT email, COUNT(email) 
FROM users
GROUP BY email
HAVING COUNT(email) > 1

So if we have a table

ID   NAME   EMAIL
1    John   asd@asd.com
2    Sam    asd@asd.com
3    Tom    asd@asd.com
4    Bob    bob@asd.com
5    Tom    asd@asd.com

This query will give us John, Sam, Tom, Tom because they all have the same email.

However, what I want is to get duplicates with the same email and name.

That is, I want to get "Tom", "Tom".

The reason I need this: I made a mistake, and allowed inserting duplicate name and email values. Now I need to remove/change the duplicates, so I need to find them first.


Solution

  • SELECT
        name, email, COUNT(*)
    FROM
        users
    GROUP BY
        name, email
    HAVING 
        COUNT(*) > 1
    

    Simply group on both of the columns.

    Note: the older ANSI standard is to have all non-aggregated columns in the GROUP BY but this has changed with the idea of "functional dependency":

    In relational database theory, a functional dependency is a constraint between two sets of attributes in a relation from a database. In other words, functional dependency is a constraint that describes the relationship between attributes in a relation.

    Support is not consistent: