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Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 14:37:43 +0200
Subject: Re: Distinct oddity 
From: Maximilian Tyrtania <maximilian.tyrtania@onlinehome.de>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
CC: <pgsql-sql@postgresql.org>
Message-ID: <C6308BB7.3611D%maximilian.tyrtania@onlinehome.de>
Thread-Topic: [SQL] Distinct oddity 
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In-Reply-To: <6111.1241879627@sss.pgh.pa.us>
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am 09.05.2009 16:33 Uhr schrieb Tom Lane unter tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us:

> What you need to do is
> dump out the *entire* results of the DISTINCT queries and look for the
> unmatched lines.  I'd try dumping to two files, stripping the 'e' with
> sed, and then sort/diff.

Okay, that's what I did, and the results are, well, surprising (for me, mind
you).

FAKDB=# \o /withapp
FAKDB=# select distinct f.bezeichnung||'$' from firmen f order by 1;

FAKDB=# \o /withoutapp
FAKDB=# select distinct f.bezeichnung from firmen f order by 1;

Opened those files (with textwrangler, as I 've never used sed), stripped
off the '$', sorted and looked at the differences (using textwranglers
"compare documents"-feature).

The file "withoutapp" has those lines:

 "Abendschau"
 "Abendschau"

They don't look distinct to me. The "Abendschau"-Entry appears only once in
"withapp". But then again the "withapp" file has these entries:

Adformatie
Adformatie 

which in turn only appear once in "withoutapp". I turned "show invisibles"
on in textwrangler, so I don't think there is some gremlin business going
on.

Actually I'm interested in but in no way dependant on what's going on here,
I just thought as a good pg-citizen I should report whatever might be wrong.

Best,

Maximilian Tyrtania