Delete all but one duplicate record

Question

I have a table that is supposed to keep a trace of visitors to a given profile (user id to user id pair). It turns out my SQL query was a bit off and is producing multiple p

Answer 1

ANSI SQL Solution

Use group by in a subquery:

delete from my_tab where id not in 
(select min(id) from my_tab group by profile_id, visitor_id);

You need some kind of unique identifier(here, I'm using id).

MySQL Solution

As pointed out by @JamesPoulson, this causes a syntax error in MySQL; the correct solution is (as shown in James' answer):

delete from `my_tab` where id not in
( SELECT * FROM 
    (select min(id) from `my_tab` group by profile_id, visitor_id) AS temp_tab
);