Remove duplicate records based on multiple columns?

Question

I\'m using Heroku to host my Ruby on Rails application and for one reason or another, I may have some duplicate rows.

Is there a way to delete duplicate records base

Answer 1

To run it on a migration I ended up doing like the following (based on the answer above by @aditya-sanghi)

class AddUniqueIndexToXYZ < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    # delete duplicates
    dedupe(XYZ, 'name', 'type')

    add_index :xyz, [:name, :type], unique: true
  end

  def dedupe(model, *key_attrs)
    model.select(key_attrs).group(key_attrs).having('count(*) > 1').each { |duplicates|
      dup_rows = model.where(duplicates.attributes.slice(key_attrs)).to_a
      # the first one we want to keep right?
      dup_rows.shift

      dup_rows.each{ |double| double.destroy } # duplicates can now be destroyed
    }
  end
end