Wanted to show you how easy it is to use the DISTINCT function in MySQL inside of Joomla.

This is very useful whenever you want to create a list of all the individual values of a specific field in a database table. It only gets that value once, so like below, there is several "Burlington" values in the city field

Table: jos_locations

So this is how you would use distinct to just grab that list of specific values.

// Get a database object
$db = &JFactory::getDBO();
$query =  ' SELECT DISTINCT city '.
          ' FROM #__ locations ';

Now we want to Set the Query.

$db->setQuery($query);

Finally we send the query and return the Results and print it out.

$results = $db->loadObjectList();
print_r($results);

The results will be in an object oriented list like this:

Array ( [0] => stdClass Object ( [city] => Graham ) [1] => stdClass Object ( [city] => Burlington ) [2] => stdClass Object ( [city] => Mebane ) )

So let me know what you think, and hope this helped!