Help with Select

[aeron glemann]

Hi-

I would like to know if it's possible to return unique values for a field that has NOT been uniquely indexed. For example, my database has a field for Countries, a field for Political Sub-divisions (states, provinces, territories, etc..) and a field for Cities. It would follow that the value for Countries - while unique since no two countries share the same name - is duplicated many times (there are only a couple hundred Countries in the world but hundreds of thousands of Cities). The value for the Political Sub-divisions is not unique - since different Countries may share provinces or territory names with other Countries - however the values themselves are unique to each Country. Likewise the Cities are not unique either EXCEPT to each Sub-division of each Country.

If you've followed me this far, I would like to know if it's possible to query the database to return just the names of the Political Sub-divisions of a Country. Obviously a Country could have thousands of Cities, but much fewer Sub-divisions. If I select it as see:

SELECT sub-division FROM db.cities WHERE country IS some_country

It's going to return the Sub-divisions for each city entry - which may only be 10 Sub-Divisions but duplicated hundreds of times for each city. SO - is it possible to return just one instance of each Sub-division. I didn't get this from the docs, but maybe someone here is cleverer than I am.

If anything isn't clear, please let me know if I could help illustrate it further. Thanks a LOT.