Use of the DISTINCT function in an SQLite query

When using an sqlite query to pull from our database, you may run into the issue where you only want to see the desired field entry once, and the resulting list or dictionary is giving it to you multiple times.

An Example

Say you want to get the source_id from the spectra table where the spectral_type is an L dwarf and the spectra regime is NIR. Meaning, you want to know which L dwarfs we have NIR spectra for. Well, the output will give you a list of all of the entries we have spectra for, even if some entries overlap on source_id. Each source_id will show up in the list per the number of separate NIR spectra we have for that object. If  you only want to see the source_id once, we can use a function tag called DISTINCT. It follows like:

SELECT DISTINCT sp.source_id FROM spectra AS sp JOIN spectral_types AS spt ON spt.source_id=sp.source_id WHERE spt.spectral_type BETWEEN 10 AND 19 AND sp.regime='NIR'

(See the joining tables post if confused on how to do so.)

*NOTE: Here I used another function BETWEEN instead of writing out spt.spectral_type>=10 AND spt.spectral_type<20