Question

I have a question:

So I have the following data in a table”

id        name     city     state      phone         price

234    Kevin    Chicago   IL        5555555555    550

234    Kevin    Chicago   IL        5555555555    NULL

234    Kevin    Chicago   IL        55555    NULL

234    Kevin    Chicago   IL        NULL    NULL

People have loaded data into a database and it is showing up like this because of character restrictions for each line…

So how can I tell my distinct query to get the most from each one..I just want this row returned:

234    Kevin    Chicago   IL        5555555555    550

And I cant do “where all rows are not null etc” because the last row can always be null too it depends.

Thanks a lot of your help!

Answer 1

Depending on what “the most” means exactly and depending on the data types of phone and price, this could be your query:

Edit: generalize query, get phone & price per person.

SELECT id, name, city, state, max(phone) AS phone, max(price) AS price
FROM   tbl
GROUP  BY id, name, city, state;

phone and price can come from different rows this way.

The manual on aggregate functions:

Unless otherwise stated, group functions ignore NULL values.

So, IFNULL or COALESCE are not required here.