SELECT DISTINCT & group by diff

To avoid using SELECT DISTINCT, you can often rephrase the query using other techniques to achieve the same result without the performance overhead of removing duplicates. Here's an example of how to avoid using SELECT DISTINCT:

Consider a table named products with columns category and price. Let's say you want to retrieve a list of unique categories from the table.

Original query using SELECT DISTINCT:

SELECT DISTINCT category FROM products;

Alternative approach using GROUP BY:

SELECT category FROM products GROUP BY category;

In this alternative approach, the GROUP BY clause achieves the same result as SELECT DISTINCT by grouping the rows based on the category column. This avoids the need for MySQL to sort and eliminate duplicates explicitly, potentially resulting in better performance.

However, it's essentia