Deleting Duplicates in Access 2003 - ms-access

I have an Access 2003 table with ~4000 records which was made from 17 different tables. Roughly half of these records are duplicates. There is no unique identifying column (id, name etc). There is an id column which was auto filled when the tables were combined meaning that the duplicates aren't completely identical (though this column could be removed if it makes things easier).
I have used the Access Find Duplicates Query Wizard which gives me a list of the duplicated records but won't let me delete them (seriously what use is this query if I can't delete them?). I've tried converting the generated query to a remove query but that changes the number of rows that it finds. I'd alter the sql by hand but it's a bit beyond me and is 7 lines long.
Does anyone know a good way of getting rid of the duplicates?

The reason the find duplicates query won't let you delete the records is because it is basically just an aggregate query, it is counting the number of duplicates it finds and returning the cases where the count is greater than 1.
Consider that if you did make a delete query based on the find duplicates, it would delete all rows that have duplicate values, which is maybe not what you want. You want to delete all but one of the duplicates.
You should try to delete all duplicates of a record apart from one, excluding the ID column in your comparison. I suggest the simplest way to do this is to make a make-table query of all the unique values (Select Distinct Field1, Field2... from MyTable) instead for every field except for the ID field, using the results in a to create a new table of around 2000 records (if half are duplicates).
Then, create an ID column on your new table, use an update query to update this ID to the first matching ID in the original table (you could do this using DLookup, which will return the first EXPRESSION value where CRITERIA is true in DOMAIN).
The DLookup() function returns one
value from a single field even if more
than one record satisfies the
criteria. If no record satisfies the
criteria, or if the domain contains no
records, DLookup() returns a Null.
Since you are identifying the first matching ID based on all the other fields, which are unique values, the unmatched IDs will belong to duplicates. You will be reversing the PK relation, identifying the first matching key given a set of unique fields. After that, you should set the ID to be PK. Of course this assumes the ID has no inherent meaning, and you don't care about keeping one particular ID for a given duplicated row over any of the IDs belonging to the other duplicated rows. This assumes you care about the data in the ID column so you want to preserve it for all remaining rows, otherwise just ignore the DLookup step and do a Select Distinct on all columns apart from the ID.

Use a select with all columns except the ID column:
SELECT DISTINCTROW Column1, Column2, Column3
INTO MYNEWTABLE
FROM TABLE
You can simply swap the names.
This solution will give you a new table with non duplicates.

The following will preserve original IDs and do it in one step:
DELETE FROM table_with_duplicates
WHERE table_with_duplicates.id NOT IN
(SELECT max(id)
FROM table_with_duplicates
GROUP BY duplicated_field_1, duplicated_field_2, ...
)
Now you have the original table with no duplicates and preserved ids.
And always remember to backup you data before trying large DELETEs.

DELETE * FROM table_with_duplicates
WHERE table_with_duplicates.ID In
(SELECT max(ID)
FROM table_with_duplicates
GROUP BY [duplicated_field_1]
HAVING Count(*)>1
)

Actually I Found A very simple solution took a while but it all of your fields across are the same like a complete duplicate record then just make one query with every field and sort by "Group BY". Thus the duplicates will combine and you can just append this information to a new table and rename it the same as the existing table. If you have a primary key field you could just ignore it in the query and then it would still combine the data (assuming that you don't care about the data in the primary field). I don't know why no one has mentioned this solution took me 5 hr. to come up with. :)

Related

How to remove duplicate entries from database which as over 10000 records with no id field

I have database like the following with 10K rows. How to delete duplicate if all fields are same. I don't want to search for any specific company. Is there a way to search and find any multiple entries with all same fields get deleted. Thanks
This command adds a unique key, and drops all rows that generate errors (due to the unique key). This removes duplicates.
ALTER IGNORE TABLE table ADD UNIQUE KEY idx1(title);
Note: This command may not work for InnoDB tables for some versions of MySQL. See this post for a workaround. (Thanks to "an anonymous user" for this information.)
OR
Simply creates a new table without duplicates. Sometimes this is actually faster and easier than trying to delete all the offending rows. Just create a new table, insert the unique rows (I used min(id) for the id of the resulting row), rename the two tables, and (once you are satisfied that everything worked correctly) drop the original table
This below query used to find the duplicate entry using all fields:
Select * from Table group by company_name,city,state,country having count(*)>1;

I have a query that finds duplicates in my SQL database-now how do I delete said duplicates?

I have an sql query that finds and groups these duplicates using very complicated conditions:
SELECT right(post_url, LOCATE('-', REVERSE(post_url),LOCATE('-',REVERSE(post_url))+1) -1) as name,
left(post_name,LOCATE('-',post_url,LOCATE('-',post_url)+1) - 1) as city,
post_title as original,ID,post_name,count(*)
FROM table WHERE post_type='finder'
GROUP BY name,city having count(*) > 1
To explain the query, post_url is basically a url name, ending with the name of someone, e.g : new-jersey-something-something-donald-t
I go to the second dash from the right and get the name that way. Then I get the city/state which is in the second dash from the left. In this manner, I've successfully found the duplicates in this database-but I'm having trouble thinking of a way to isolate the duplicate and delete it. In addition, I only want to delete the copy that does not have %near% in post_url. my question is, using the query here, how would I change this to delete the duplicate?
You're not going to be able to do it in one query. That's because you need to write a query that looks something like this:
DELETE FROM table
WHERE id IN (SELECT ... FROM table WHERE ...)
MySQL specifically prohibits this. You can't delete based on a subquery that references the same table. You also can't rewrite this query using JOINs.
There is an easy solution, though: use a temporary table and two queries.
-- build the list of IDs to delete
CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE temp
SELECT ... FROM table WHERE ...
-- now delete those items
DELETE FROM table
WHERE id IN (SELECT id FROM temp);
You can improve performance with JOINs and indexes.
The key to "isolating" the duplicates is to ensure that every item you want to delete has a primary key - that way you can easily build a list of IDs to delete. If your table don't have primary keys, you are reduced to doing WHERE clauses and JOINs on multiple columns - that gets messy very quickly.

merge two large tables with unique values

I have to large tables, a main one (TableA) with around 14 million records and a second one I want to merge into it with 20 million records (TableB). For the most part the first is a subset of the second.
I tried making a Unique Index using 2 or 3 fields combined that would identify records as such but MySql wouldn't do it.
I then made my own field 'Unique' by concatenating those three fields.
My question is how do I an import TableB into TableA using only unique records i.e. ones where the value in Unique field in TableB does not already exist in Unique field in TableA. Since I could not make the Unique field an actual unique index will/should I try to make each one a PK and or ordinary index in the respective tables?
Any thoughts on how to do this efficiently appreciated.
Use the sql union statement.
"select * from tableA join tableb"

Index counter shared by multiple tables in mysql

I have two tables, each one has a primary ID column as key. I want the two tables to share one increasing key counter.
For example, when the two tables are empty, and counter = 1. When record A is about to be inserted to table 1, its ID will be 1 and the counter will be increased to 2. When record B is about to be inserted to table 2, its ID will be 2 and the counter will be increased to 3. When record C is about to be inserted to table 1 again, its ID will be 3 and so on.
I am using PHP as the outside language. Now I have two options:
Keep the counter in the database as a single-row-single-column table. But every time I add things to table A or B, I need to update this counter table.
I can keep the counter as a global variable in PHP. But then I need to initialize the counter from the maximum key of the two tables at the start of apache, which I have no idea how to do.
Any suggestion for this?
The background is, I want to display a mix of records from the two tables in either ASC or DESC order of the creation time of the records. Furthermore, the records will be displayed in page-style, say, 50 records per page. Records are only added to the database rather than being removed. Following my above implementation, I can just perform a "select ... where key between 1 and 50" from two tables and merge the select datasets together, sort the 50 records according to IDs and display them.
Is there any other idea of implementing this requirement?
Thank you very much
Well, you will gain next to nothing with this setup; if you just keep the datetime of the insert you can easily do
SELECT * FROM
(
SELECT columnA, columnB, inserttime
FROM table1
UNION ALL
SELECT columnA, columnB, inserttime
FROM table2
)
ORDER BY inserttime
LIMIT 1, 50
And it will perform decently.
Alternatively (if chasing last drop of preformance), if you are merging the results it can be an indicator to merge the tables (why have two tables anyway if you are merging the results).
Or do it as SQL subclass (then you can have one table maintain IDs and other common attributes, and the other two reference the common ID sequence as foreign key).
if you need creatin time wont it be easier to add a timestamp field to your db and sort them according to that field?
i believe using ids as a refrence of creation is bad practice.
If you really must do this, there is a way. Create a one-row, one-column table to hold the last-used row number, and set it to zero. On each of your two data tables, create an AFTER INSERT trigger to read that table, increment it, and set the newly-inserted row number to that value. I can't remember the exact syntax because I haven't created a trigger for years; see here http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/triggers.html

Remove repeat rows from MySQL table

Is there a way to remove all repeat rows from a MySQL database?
A couple of years ago, someone requested a way to delete duplicates. Subselects make it possible with a query like this in MySQL 4.1:
DELETE FROM some_table WHERE primaryKey NOT IN
(SELECT MIN(primaryKey) FROM some_table GROUP BY some_column)
Of course, you can use MAX(primaryKey) as well if you want to keep the newest record with the duplicate value instead of the oldest record with the duplicate value.
To understand how this works, look at the output of this query:
SELECT some_column, MIN(primaryKey) FROM some_table GROUP BY some_column
As you can see, this query returns the primary key for the first record containing each value of some_column. Logically, then, any key value NOT found in this result set must be a duplicate, and therefore it should be deleted.
These questions / answers might interest you :
How to delete duplicate records in mysql database?
How to delete Duplicates in MySQL table.
And idea that's often used when you are working with a big table is to :
Create a new table
Insert into that table the unique records (i.e. only one version of the duplicates in the original table, generally using a select distinct)
and use that new table in your application ; or drop the old table and rename the new one to the old name.
Good thing with this principle is you have the possibility to verify what's in the new table before dropping the old one -- always nice to check that sort of thing ^^