Question

I have a “Tickets” table with somewhat following structure (removed unnecessary columns)

int | string   | int   |
ID  | Window   | Count |
------------------------
0   | Internet | 10    |
1   | Phone    | 20    |
2   | Fax      | 15    |
3   | Fax      | 10    |
4   | Internet | 5     |
.   | .        | .     |
.   | .        | .     |

And I have mapped this table to a class “Ticket”. So I can get all records like this:

var tickets = from t in db.Tickets
              select t;

Now I need to get the list of unique window names in the table. For above table, list would look something like:

• Internet
• Phone
• Fax

Is there anyway to create this list without fetching all records and iterating over them?

I am using SQL Server 2008 express edition.

EDIT:
Thanks for the answers guys it solved the above problem. Just being greedy but is there any way to also get the total of count for each window. For example:

• Internet = 15
• Phone = 25
• Fax = 20

Answer 1

How about:

var tickets = db.Tickets.Select(t => t.Window).Distinct();

I prefer to only use query expressions when I’m doing more than one operation, but if you like them the equivalent is:

var tickets = (from t in db.Tickets
               select t.Window).Distinct(); 

To get the counts, you need to group:

var tickets = from t in db.Tickets
              group t by t.Window into grouped
              select new { Window=grouped.Key, 
                           Total=grouped.Sum(x => x.Count) };

foreach (var entry in tickets)
{
    Console.WriteLine("{0}: {1}", entry.Window, entry.Total);
}

Note that this should all end up being performed at the database side – examine the SQL query to check this.