DISTINCT is not a Function

Lukas Eder corrects a misconception:

A very common misconception I often encounter with SQL users is the idea that DISTINCT is something like a function, and that it can take parenthesised arguments. Just recently, I’ve seen this Stack Overflow question where the OP was looking for a way to express this in jOOQ:

SELECT DISTINCT (emp.id), emp.fname, emp.name FROM employee emp;

Notice the parentheses around (emp.id), which look as though this is some special kind of DISTINCT usage, which is akin to a DISTINCT function. The idea is often that:

– The behaviour is somewhat different from omitting the parentheses
– The performance is faster, because only the ID needs to be considered for distinctness

Both of these ideas are (mostly) wrong, as Lukas shows.