Comment by wvbdmp

Comment by 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.

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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