Remove duplicate rows in MySQL

I have a table with the following fields:

id (Unique)
url (Unique)
title
company
site_id

Now, I need to remove rows having same title, company and site_id. One way to do it will be using the following SQL along with a script (PHP):

SELECT title, site_id, location, id, count( * ) 
FROM jobs
GROUP BY site_id, company, title, location
HAVING count( * ) >1

After running this query, I can remove duplicates using a server side script.

But, I want to know if this can be done only using SQL query.

 Answers

A really easy way to do this is to add a UNIQUE index on the 3 columns. When you write the ALTER statement, include the IGNORE keyword. Like so:

ALTER IGNORE TABLE jobs
ADD UNIQUE INDEX idx_name (site_id, title, company);

This will drop all the duplicate rows. As an added benefit, future INSERTs that are duplicates will error out. As always, you may want to take a backup before running something like this...

---

MySQL has restrictions about referring to the table you are deleting from. You can work around that with a temporary table, like:

create temporary table tmpTable (id int);

insert  tmpTable
        (id)
select  id
from    YourTable yt
where   exists
        (
        select  *
        from    YourTabe yt2
        where   yt2.title = yt.title
                and yt2.company = yt.company
                and yt2.site_id = yt.site_id
                and yt2.id > yt.id
        );

delete  
from    YourTable
where   ID in (select id from tmpTable);

From Kostanos' suggestion in the comments:
The only slow query above is DELETE, for cases where you have a very large database. This query could be faster:

DELETE FROM YourTable USING YourTable, tmpTable WHERE YourTable.id=tmpTable.id

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There is another solution :

DELETE t1 FROM my_table t1, my_table t2 WHERE t1.id < t2.id AND t1.my_field = t2.my_field AND t1.my_field_2 = t2.my_field_2 AND ...

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I have this query snipet for SQLServer but I think It can be used in others DBMS with little changes:

DELETE
FROM Table
WHERE Table.idTable IN  (  
    SELECT MAX(idTable)
    FROM idTable
    GROUP BY field1, field2, field3
    HAVING COUNT(*) > 1)

I forgot to tell you that this query doesn't remove the row with the lowest id of the duplicated rows. If this works for you try this query:

DELETE
FROM jobs
WHERE jobs.id IN  (  
    SELECT MAX(id)
    FROM jobs
    GROUP BY site_id, company, title, location
    HAVING COUNT(*) > 1)

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The faster way is to insert distinct rows into a temporary table. Using delete, it took me a few hours to remove duplicates from a table of 8 million rows. Using insert and distinct, it took just 13 minutes.

CREATE TABLE tempTableName LIKE tableName;  
CREATE INDEX ix_all_id ON tableName(cellId,attributeId,entityRowId,value);  
INSERT INTO tempTableName(cellId,attributeId,entityRowId,value) SELECT DISTINCT cellId,attributeId,entityRowId,value FROM tableName;  
TRUNCATE TABLE tableName;
INSERT INTO tableName SELECT * FROM tempTableName; 
DROP TABLE tempTableName;  

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I keep visiting this page anytime I google "remove duplicates form mysql" but for my theIGNORE solutions don't work because I have an InnoDB mysql tables

this code works better anytime

CREATE TABLE tableToclean_temp LIKE tableToclean;
ALTER TABLE tableToclean_temp ADD UNIQUE INDEX (fontsinuse_id);
INSERT IGNORE INTO tableToclean_temp SELECT * FROM tableToclean;
DROP TABLE tableToclean;
RENAME TABLE tableToclean_temp TO tableToclean;

tableToclean = the name of the table you need to clean

tableToclean_temp = a temporary table created and deleted

---

I like to be a bit more specific as to which records I delete so here is my solution:

delete
from jobs c1
where not c1.location = 'Paris'
and  c1.site_id > 64218
and exists 
(  
select * from jobs c2 
where c2.site_id = c1.site_id
and   c2.company = c1.company
and   c2.location = c1.location
and   c2.title = c1.title
and   c2.site_id > 63412
and   c2.site_id < 64219
)

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I had to do this with text fields and came across the limit of 100 bytes on the index.

I solved this by adding a column, doing a md5 hash of the fields, and the doing the alter.

ALTER TABLE table ADD `merged` VARCHAR( 40 ) NOT NULL ;
UPDATE TABLE SET merged` = MD5(CONCAT(`col1`, `col2`, `col3`))
ALTER IGNORE TABLE table ADD UNIQUE INDEX idx_name (`merged`);