To set the record straight, I am doing it in Perl, and for more detail of what I'm doing with DBI -- what the tables look like is more or less irrelevant, but essentially my select is:

select actor_name, episode_title, character_name
FROM <my tables>
WHERE <certain table columns match> AND actor_id = $id
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And this results in rows representing a list of episodes an actor has appeared in. Most of the time he or she played the same character, so the character_name is the same in every row.

I wanted to be able to do a preliminary type of select which returned either one or more-than-one rows depending on whether that actor played one or more roles in total.

It does seem that GROUP BY will do what I want. Thanks.

Slightly off topic... but since you mentioned it: PLEASE don't actually put literal values into your sql by string interpolation: $sql = "... thing_id = $thing_id ...";. Do it with placeholders and bind values. This can be more and less of a performance issue with different types of databases, but it is always a security issue. In some databases, I could specify a $thing_id of "5; drop table thing", and you'd be hating life. On databases where that sort of thing can't be made to work (like oracle, for example), I could still plant a denial of service attack by saying that $thing_id was

"(select min(thing1.thing_id)
from
    thing thing1,
    thing thing2,
    thing thing3,
    thing thing4,
    thing thing5,
    thing thing6,
    thing thing7,
    thing thing8,
    thing thing9,
    thing thing10
--look!  no 'where', clause this is a 10-way cartesian product of thin
+g!
)"
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You can come back in a month when your database finishes processing that query.

------------
:Wq
Not an editor command: Wq

Thanks for reminding me. I didn't understand the second example, but I sure as hell understood the first. I will certainly make sure that stuff is sorted out before the site becomes public.

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($_='kkvvttuubbooppuuiiffssqqffssmmiibbddllffss')
 =~y~b-v~a-z~s;                             print
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