On 11 February 2013 07:47, Alban Hertroys <haramrae@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Feb 11, 2013, at 2:23, Tim Uckun <timuckun@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> This works pretty good except for when the top 100 records have
> duplicated email address (two sales for the same email address).
>
> I am wondering what the best strategy is for dealing with this
> scenario. Doing the records one at a time would work but obviously it
> would be much slower. There are no other columns I can rely on to
> make the record more unique either.
The best strategy is fixing your data-model so that you have a unique key. As you found out already, e-mail addresses aren't very suitable as unique keys for people. For this particular case I'd suggest adding a surrogate key.
Alternatively, you might try using (first_name, email) as your key. You'll probably still get some duplicates, but they should be less and perhaps few enough for your case.
I may be missing the point of the query, but wasn't it to add an entry for each email address and (if it already exists in people) to update the firstname field to match the firstname in the order?
Given that the results will be returned in random order I would just change the "nd" query to SELECT DISTINCT ON (email) , but like I said I may be missing the point.
Geoff
