The DISTINCT Keyword

The DISTINCT Keyword In situations in which you have multiple duplicate records in a table, it might make more sense to return only unique records, instead of fetching the duplicates.
The SQL DISTINCT keyword is used in conjunction with SELECT to eliminate all duplicate records and return only unique ones.
The basic syntax of DISTINCT is as follows:
SELECT DISTINCT column_name1, column_name2
FROM table_name;
See the customers table below:


Note that there are duplicate City names. The following SQL statement selects only distinct values from the City column:
SELECT DISTINCT City FROM customers;
This would produce the following result. Duplicate entries have been removed.


The DISTINCT keyword only fetches the unique values.