Comment by mbb70

Comment by mbb70 10 hours ago

The very next ask will be "order the zipcodes by number of customers" at which point you'll be back to aggregations, which is where you should have started

wvbdmp 9 hours ago

Anti-Patterns You Should Avoid: overengineering for potential future requirements. Are there real-life cases where you should design with the future in mind? Yes. Are there real-life cases where DISTINCT is the best choice by whatever metric you prioritize at the time? Also yes.

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RHSeeger 9 hours ago

> Are there real-life cases where DISTINCT is the best choice by whatever metric you prioritize at the time
Indeed, along that line, I would say that DISTINCT can be used to convey intent... and doing that in code is important.
- I want to know the zipcodes we have customers in - DISTINCT
- I want to know how many customers we have in each zipcode - aggregates
Can you do the first with the second? Sure.. but the first makes it clear what your goal is.

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- dleeftink 7 hours ago
  
  Partly in jest, but maybe we need a NON-DISTINCT signaller to convey the inverse and return duplicate values only.
  SOMEWHAT-DISTINCT with a fuzzy threshold would also be useful.
  
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  RHSeeger 4 hours ago
  
  I hear you. It's not all _that_ uncommon for me to query for "things with more than one instance". Although, to be fair, it's more common for me to that when grep/sort/uniqing logs on the command line.
  
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majormajor 8 hours ago

Here we start to get close to analytics sql vs application sql, and I think that's a whole separate beast itself with different patterns and anti-patterns.

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bandrami 4 hours ago

Ah, yeah, you beat me to it. I do reporting, not applications.

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bandrami 4 hours ago

I do reporting, not application development. If somebody wants to know different information I'd write a different query.