How can I remove duplicate rows?

What is the best way to remove duplicate rows from a fairly large SQL Server table (i.e. 300,000+ rows)?

The rows, of course, will not be perfect duplicates because of the existence of the RowID identity field.

MyTable

RowID int not null identity(1,1) primary key,
Col1 varchar(20) not null,
Col2 varchar(2048) not null,
Col3 tinyint not null

Solution 1:

Assuming no nulls, you GROUP BY the unique columns, and SELECT the MIN (or MAX) RowId as the row to keep. Then, just delete everything that didn't have a row id:

DELETE FROM MyTable
LEFT OUTER JOIN (
   SELECT MIN(RowId) as RowId, Col1, Col2, Col3 
   FROM MyTable 
   GROUP BY Col1, Col2, Col3
) as KeepRows ON
   MyTable.RowId = KeepRows.RowId
WHERE
   KeepRows.RowId IS NULL

In case you have a GUID instead of an integer, you can replace

MIN(RowId)

with

CONVERT(uniqueidentifier, MIN(CONVERT(char(36), MyGuidColumn)))

Solution 2:

Another possible way of doing this is

; 

--Ensure that any immediately preceding statement is terminated with a semicolon above
WITH cte
     AS (SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY Col1, Col2, Col3 
                                       ORDER BY ( SELECT 0)) RN
         FROM   #MyTable)
DELETE FROM cte
WHERE  RN > 1;

I am using ORDER BY (SELECT 0) above as it is arbitrary which row to preserve in the event of a tie.

To preserve the latest one in RowID order for example you could use ORDER BY RowID DESC

Execution Plans

The execution plan for this is often simpler and more efficient than that in the accepted answer as it does not require the self join.

This is not always the case however. One place where the GROUP BY solution might be preferred is situations where a hash aggregate would be chosen in preference to a stream aggregate.

The ROW_NUMBER solution will always give pretty much the same plan whereas the GROUP BY strategy is more flexible.

Factors which might favour the hash aggregate approach would be

• No useful index on the partitioning columns
• relatively fewer groups with relatively more duplicates in each group

In extreme versions of this second case (if there are very few groups with many duplicates in each) one could also consider simply inserting the rows to keep into a new table then TRUNCATE-ing the original and copying them back to minimise logging compared to deleting a very high proportion of the rows.

Solution 3:

There's a good article on removing duplicates on the Microsoft Support site. It's pretty conservative - they have you do everything in separate steps - but it should work well against large tables.

I've used self-joins to do this in the past, although it could probably be prettied up with a HAVING clause:

DELETE dupes
FROM MyTable dupes, MyTable fullTable
WHERE dupes.dupField = fullTable.dupField 
AND dupes.secondDupField = fullTable.secondDupField 
AND dupes.uniqueField > fullTable.uniqueField

Solution 4:

The following query is useful to delete duplicate rows. The table in this example has ID as an identity column and the columns which have duplicate data are Column1, Column2 and Column3.

DELETE FROM TableName
WHERE  ID NOT IN (SELECT MAX(ID)
                  FROM   TableName
                  GROUP  BY Column1,
                            Column2,
                            Column3
                  /*Even if ID is not null-able SQL Server treats MAX(ID) as potentially
                    nullable. Because of semantics of NOT IN (NULL) including the clause
                    below can simplify the plan*/
                  HAVING MAX(ID) IS NOT NULL) 

The following script shows usage of GROUP BY, HAVING, ORDER BY in one query, and returns the results with duplicate column and its count.

SELECT YourColumnName,
       COUNT(*) TotalCount
FROM   YourTableName
GROUP  BY YourColumnName
HAVING COUNT(*) > 1
ORDER  BY COUNT(*) DESC