in reply to Re: Re: OT: routine for finding duplicate entries from a MySQL Table
in thread OT: routine for finding duplicate entries from a MySQL Table

Well, the problem is that the OP wasn't very clear about what is a duplicate record. He mentioned an ID, but it isn't in the table description, so I assumed that a primary key existed, apart the columns that were mentioned.

Anyway, if the problem is (more trivially) to find out if several records have the same "questions" column, then it's even simpler:

SELECT questions, COUNT(*) AS howmany FROM yourtable GROUP BY questions HAVING howmany > 1

To remove such duplicates, on the same vein:

ALTER IGNORE TABLE yourtable ADD UNIQUE KEY (questions)

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Re: Re: Re: Re: OT: routine for finding duplicate entries from a MySQL Table
by soon_j (Scribe) on Feb 04, 2004 at 22:46 UTC
    Sorry for the vague description of the problem above. There's actually an AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY ques_id that exists in the table, and many other columns that I did not show.

    Your suggestion is highly appreciated. Thanks.