MySQL Cookbook

Determining Whether Values are Unique

Problem

You want to know whether table values are unique.

Solution

Use HAVING in conjunction with COUNT( ).

Discussion

You can use HAVING to find unique values in situations to which DISTINCT does not apply. DISTINCT eliminates duplicates, but doesn’t show which values actually were duplicated in the original data. HAVING can tell you which values were unique or non-unique.

The following queries show the days on which only one driver was active, and the days on which more than one driver was active. They’re based on using HAVING and COUNT( ) to determine which trav_date values are unique or non-unique:

mysql> SELECT trav_date, COUNT(trav_date)
    -> FROM driver_log
    -> GROUP BY trav_date
    -> HAVING COUNT(trav_date) = 1;
+------------+------------------+
| trav_date  | COUNT(trav_date) |
+------------+------------------+
| 2001-11-26 |                1 |
| 2001-11-27 |                1 |
| 2001-12-01 |                1 |
+------------+------------------+
mysql> SELECT trav_date, COUNT(trav_date)
    -> FROM driver_log
    -> GROUP BY trav_date
    -> HAVING COUNT(trav_date) > 1;
+------------+------------------+
| trav_date  | COUNT(trav_date) |
+------------+------------------+
| 2001-11-29 |                3 |
| 2001-11-30 |                2 |
| 2001-12-02 |                2 |
+------------+------------------+

This technique works for combinations of values, too. For example, to find message sender/recipient pairs between whom only one message was sent, look for combinations that occur only once in the mail table:

mysql> SELECT srcuser, dstuser
    -> FROM ...