Finding duplicate values in a SQL table

Question

It's easy to find duplicates with one field:

SELECT email, COUNT(email) 
FROM users
GROUP BY email
HAVING COUNT(email) > 1

So if we have a table

ID   NAME   EMAIL
1    John   [email protected]
2    Sam    [email protected]
3    Tom    [email protected]
4    Bob    [email protected]
5    Tom    [email protected]

This query will give us John, Sam, Tom, Tom because they all have the same email.

However, what I want is to get duplicates with the same email and name.

That is, I want to get "Tom", "Tom".

The reason I need this: I made a mistake, and allowed inserting duplicate name and email values. Now I need to remove/change the duplicates, so I need to find them first.

Answer 1

SELECT
    name, email, COUNT(*)
FROM
    users
GROUP BY
    name, email
HAVING 
    COUNT(*) > 1

Simply group on both of the columns.

Note: the older ANSI standard is to have all non-aggregated columns in the GROUP BY but this has changed with the idea of "functional dependency":

In relational database theory, a functional dependency is a constraint between two sets of attributes in a relation from a database. In other words, functional dependency is a constraint that describes the relationship between attributes in a relation.

Support is not consistent:

• Recent PostgreSQL supports it.
• SQL Server (as at SQL Server 2017) still requires all non-aggregated columns in the GROUP BY.
• MySQL is unpredictable and you need sql_mode=only_full_group_by:
  • GROUP BY lname ORDER BY showing wrong results;
  • Which is the least expensive aggregate function in the absence of ANY() (see comments in accepted answer).
• Oracle isn't mainstream enough (warning: humour, I don't know about Oracle).