Improvement to article: Deleting Duplicate Rows in a MySQL Database

[nicc777]

I assume you noticed that there is a syntax error in the SQL you submitted:

SELECT DISTINCT bigimage user,userid should read: SELECT DISTINCT bigimage,user,userid ( notice the comma between bigimage and user )

With that out of the way, I see you mention that the SELECT query returns all records. I would like you to do an experiment:

SELECT 
   DISTINCT bigimage, COUNT( bigimage ) AS qty 
FROM 
   photos 
GROUP BY 1 HAVING qty > 1

The above code is untested, but should work. The idea is to only display those rows where the 'qty' is more then 1 ( duplicates ). If nothing is returned, then there is no duplicates.

Let us know what the results are.

Cheers