Question

I have very simple problem that I can’t solve. I need to do something like this:

select distinct * from (1, 1, 1, 2, 5, 1, 6).

Anybody can help??

Edit

The data comes as a text file from one of our clients. It’s totally unformatted (it’s a single, very long line of text), but it may be possible to do so in Excel. But it’s not practical for me, because I will need to use these values in my sql query. It’s not convenient to do so every time I need to run a query.

Answer 1

Simplest way to get the distinct values of a long list of comma delimited text would be to use a find an replace with UNION to get the distinct values.

SELECT 1
UNION SELECT 1
UNION SELECT 1
UNION SELECT 2
UNION SELECT 5
UNION SELECT 1
UNION SELECT 6

Applied to your long line of comma delimited text

• Find and replace every comma with UNION SELECT
• Add a SELECT in front of the statement

You now should have a working query