How to keep only one row of a table, removing duplicate rows?

Question

I have a table that has a lot of duplicates in the Name column. I\'d like to only keep one row for each.

The following lists the duplicates, but I don\'t know how to

Answer 1

WITH CTE AS
(
    SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY [emp_id] ORDER BY [emp_id]) AS Row, * FROM employee_salary
)


DELETE FROM CTE
WHERE ROW <> 1

Answer 2

See the following question: Deleting duplicate rows from a table.

The adapted accepted answer from there (which is my answer, so no "theft" here...):

You can do it in a simple way assuming you have a unique ID field: you can delete all records that are the same except for the ID, but don't have "the minimum ID" for their name.

Example query:

DELETE FROM members
WHERE ID NOT IN
(
    SELECT MIN(ID)
    FROM members
    GROUP BY name
)

In case you don't have a unique index, my recommendation is to simply add an auto-incremental unique index. Mainly because it's good design, but also because it will allow you to run the query above.