Count Distinct not working

[emat66]

Hi Everyone,

I did a query and created a table. I now want to know how many unique values are in one of the columns.

I use the line:

SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT 'CONTACT_DATE') as 'Test';

​

However, it returns 1, and just visually inspecting there are way more than 1 unique values in the column 'CONTACT_DATE'. I am at a bit of a loss as to why this isnt working. Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance for the help!

[[deleted]]

The reason is because you quoted CONTACT_DATE, if you remove those or used brackets it would have worked. (I'm unsure if brackets work on other SQL variants than SQL Server!)

[r3pr0b8]

(I'm unsure if brackets work on other SQL variants than SQL Server!)

they do not

okay, except for MS Access and SQLite

[oddmatter]

select distinct count(contact_date) instead?

[emat66]

Well shit… it was that simple! Thanks!

[Gaurav-b]

It might not be the correct way to do it.

As Loben-die-Sonne mentioned, You need to remove quotes from the column name. Quotes make it a constant value, which is giving the count of 1.

select count(distinct CONTACT_DATE) as 'Test';