Question

I have the following bit of code, and it works so far:

SELECT  
    [id],
    COALESCE ([Company], [LastName] + ', ' + [FirstName]) as Customer
FROM [some_database].[dbo].[some_table]
ORDER BY Customer

However, I’d like to use the DISTINCT keyword to eliminate duplicate “Customer” entries. Is this possible? I’ve tried it a few different ways, but to no avail.

Answer 1

If you have multiple customer entries with the same name, you have to pick one ID for a given name. Here’s an example of picking the most recently created (ie max()), but you may want the first created (ie min()):

SELECT  
    Max([id]) as id,
    COALESCE ([Company], [LastName] + ', ' + [FirstName]) as Customer
FROM [some_database].[dbo].[some_table]
GROUP BY 2
ORDER BY Customer

EDITED: Sorry… GROUP BY 2, not 1