delete duplicates

Question

Is it poosible to delete just one column in a table when display out?

company name ||  name || year||
____________________________________
walmart      || jason || 1990
___________________________________
walmart      || mary  || 2000

to

company name ||  name || year||
____________________________________
walmart      || jason || 1990
___________________________________
             || mary  || 2000
____________________________________

the data is retrived from database.

Answer 1

you'll have to do this on the client side.
something like
while CurrentValue == PreviousValue write empty string.

Answer 2

You can also do it server side with something like:

SELECT IF(
  IFNULL((SELECT t2.company_name FROM `table` t2 WHERE t1.company_name = t2.company_name AND t2.year < t1.year LIMIT 1), "") = "", company_name,"")
  name, year, FROM `table` t1 ORDER BY company_name, year

I'm no SQL guru, so I guess someone is able to rewrite this to be more efficient, but what I am doing is grabbing the company_name with the sub SELECT, if there is a company_name with with the same name, but a lower year. Then I invert it, by checking the result is NULL (no earlier year available)

Answer 3

There are many ways to achieve this in SQL, but that's the wrong place to do do.
This is also a typical feature of reporting tools.