SQL grouping by all the columns

Question

Is their any way to group by all the columns of a table without specifying the column names

like

select * from table group by *

Thanks

Answer 1

No because this fundamentally means that you will not be grouping anything. If you group by all columns (and have a properly defined table w/ a unique index) then SELECT * FROM table is essentially the same thing as SELECT * FROM table GROUP BY *.

Answer 2

Short answer: no. GROUP BY clauses intrinsically require order to the way they arrange your results. A different order of field groupings would lead to different results.

Specifying a wildcard would leave the statement open to interpretation and unpredictable behaviour.

Answer 3

If you are using SqlServer the distinct keyword should work for you. (Not sure about other databases)

declare @t table (a int , b int)

insert into @t (a,b) select 1, 1
insert into @t (a,b) select 1, 2
insert into @t (a,b) select 1, 1

select distinct * from @t

results in

a b
1 1
1 2

Answer 4

The DISTINCT Keyword

I believe what you are trying to do is:

SELECT DISTINCT * FROM MyFooTable;

If you group by all columns, you are just requesting that duplicate data be removed.

For example a table with the following data:

 id |     value      
----+----------------
  1 | foo
  2 | bar
  1 | foo
  3 | something else

If you perform the following query which is essentially the same as SELECT * FROM MyFooTable GROUP BY * if you are assuming * means all columns:

SELECT * FROM MyFooTable GROUP BY id, value;

 id |     value      
----+----------------
  1 | foo
  3 | something else
  2 | bar

It removes all duplicate values, which essentially makes it semantically identical to using the DISTINCT keyword with the exception of the ordering of results. For example:

SELECT DISTINCT * FROM MyFooTable;

 id |     value      
----+----------------
  1 | foo
  2 | bar
  3 | something else

Answer 5

nope. are you trying to do some aggregation? if so, you could do something like this to get what you need

;with a as
(
     select sum(IntField) as Total
     from Table
     group by CharField
)
select *, a.Total
from Table t
inner join a
on t.Field=a.Field