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Get to know SELECT COUNT DISTINCT

Your database doesn't have any defined keys so far, and you don't know which columns or combinations of columns are suited as keys.

There's a simple way of finding out whether a certain column (or a combination) contains only unique values – and thus identifies the records in the table.

You already know the SELECT DISTINCT query from the first chapter. Now you just have to wrap everything within the COUNT() function and PostgreSQL will return the number of unique rows for the given columns:

SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT(column_a, column_b, ...))
FROM table;

This exercise is part of the course

Introduction to Relational Databases in SQL

View Course

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

-- Count the number of rows in universities
SELECT ___ 
FROM ___;
Edit and Run Code