Question

Is there a way to get the case-insensitive distinct rows from this SAS SQL query? …

SELECT DISTINCT country FROM companies;

The ideal solution would consist of a single query.

Results now look like:

Australia
australia
AUSTRALIA
Hong Kong
HONG KONG

… where any of the 2 distinct rows is really required

One could upper-case the data, but this unnecessarily changes values in a manner that doesn’t suit the purpose of this query.

Answer 1

If you have some primary int key (let’s call it ID), you could use:

SELECT country FROM companies
WHERE id =
(
    SELECT Min(id) FROM companies
    GROUP BY Upper(country)
)