SQL grouping by all the columns

Question

Is there any way to group by all the columns of a table without specifying the column names? Like:

select * from table group by *

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

Here is my suggestion:

DECLARE @FIELDS VARCHAR(MAX), @NUM INT

--DROP TABLE #FIELD_LIST

SET @NUM = 1
SET @FIELDS = ''

SELECT 
'SEQ' = IDENTITY(int,1,1) ,
COLUMN_NAME
INTO #FIELD_LIST
FROM Req.INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
WHERE TABLE_NAME = N'new340B'

WHILE @NUM <= (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM #FIELD_LIST)
BEGIN
SET @FIELDS = @FIELDS + ',' + (SELECT COLUMN_NAME FROM #FIELD_LIST WHERE SEQ = @NUM)
SET @NUM = @NUM + 1
END

SET @FIELDS = RIGHT(@FIELDS,LEN(@FIELDS)-1)

EXEC('SELECT ' + @FIELDS + ', COUNT(*) AS QTY FROM [Req].[dbo].[new340B] GROUP BY ' + @FIELDS + ' HAVING COUNT(*) > 1  ') 

Answer 3

He is trying find and display the duplicate rows in a table.

SELECT *, COUNT(*) AS NoOfOccurrences
FROM TableName GROUP BY *
HAVING COUNT(*) > 1

Do we have a simple way to accomplish this?

Answer 4

You can use Group by All but be careful as Group by All will be removed from future versions of SQL server.

Answer 5

I wanted to do counts and sums over full resultset. I achieved grouping by all with GROUP BY 1=1.

Answer 6

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