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Speed Up SELECT DISTINCT Queries

By : Neil Boyle Jun 30, 2002

Many people use the DISTINCT option in a SELECT statement to filter out duplicate results from a query's output. Take this simple PUBS database query as an example:

SELECT DISTINCT
au_fname,
au_lname
FROM authors

In a simple SELECT from one table (like the one above) this is the easiest and quickest way of doing things.

However, with a more complex query you should think about re-coding it to gain a performance advantage. Take this query for example, which only returns authors that have a book already published.

SELECT DISTINCT
au_fname,
au_lname
FROM authors a JOIN titleAuthor t
ON t.au_id = a.au_id

Here, we only want to see unique names of authors who have written books. The query will work as required, but we can get a small performance improvement if we write it like this:

SELECT au_fname,
au_lname
FROM authors a
WHERE EXISTS (
SELECT *
FROM titleAuthor t
WHERE t.au_id = a.au_id
)

The reason the second example runs slightly quicker is that the EXISTS clause will cause a name to be returned when the first book is found, and no further books for that author will be considered (we already have the author’s name, and we only want to see it once)

On the other hand, the DISTINCT query returns one copy of the author’s name for each book the author has worked on, and the list of authors generated subsequently needs to be examined for duplicates to satisfy the DISTINCT clause. 

You can examine the execution plan for each query to see where the performance improvements come from. For example, in SQL 6.5 you will normally see a step involving a Worktable mentioned for the "DISTINCT" version, which does not happen in the EXISTS version. In SQL Server 7.0 and 2000 you can generate a graphical execution plan for the two queries and more easily compare them.