Re^3: Help with removing dupes from a string with perl

In Sybase you can use a a group by and a having clause, even without using any aggregates in the main query.

So something like

select jobname, status, timestamp, comment
from the_table
group by jobname
having timestamp = max(timestamp)
[download]

should return something reasonable without the need for a sub-query.

Michael

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Re^4: Help with removing dupes from a string with perl by tilly (Archbishop) on Jul 27, 2009 at 07:20 UTC
For the record, I hate that "feature". What it means is that if you accidentally leave a field that is in the SELECT out of the GROUP BY, you'll introduce a join. Depending on the query, this join can be very large and very poorly behaved. Particularly if you've left joined to a large table. When I worked with Sybase I think I made this mistake every few months (with the left out field from a very large table), and inevitably didn't notice until my query had been grinding away for half an hour and the database was feeling the pressure. The database it usually happened on was used for production purposes, but luckily the consequences were only internally visible, and very few people were affected. Still it was my second greatest annoyance with Sybase. (They've since fixed my greatest annoyance at the time, which was page level locking.)	[reply]
Re^5: Help with removing dupes from a string with perl by mpeppler (Vicar) on Jul 30, 2009 at 06:02 UTC
I agree with you for the general case (and I use a development tool that will flag such omissions as a defect). But occasionally it is really useful - in particular for me as I write way more SQL (in stored procs, etc) than perl or any other client-side language these days. Michael	[reply]