Unique Order Statuses — DISTINCT in SQL

The problem

Brightlane's operations team is auditing the order pipeline and wants to see what status values are currently in use across the platform.

Write a query to return each status value that appears in the orders table, with no duplicates.

Assumptions:

The orders table contains every order Brightlane has processed.
The status column records each order's current stage; the same status appears on many orders.

Output:

One row per distinct status value, with a single column status.

Schema · ecommerce 5 tables

categories

id integer

name text

parent_id? integer

products

id integer

name text

category_id integer

price numeric

stock_qty integer

attributes? jsonb

order_items

id integer

order_id integer

product_id integer

quantity integer

unit_price numeric

customers

id integer

name text

email text

city? text

country text

created_at timestamptz

is_active boolean

orders

id integer

customer_id integer

ordered_at timestamptz

status text

total_amount numeric

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Solution query

SELECT DISTINCT
  status
FROM
  orders

The shape

DISTINCT status collapses a column that repeats across thousands of orders down to its four real values: delivered, cancelled, pending, shipped. That's the entire active value space of the order pipeline, on one screen.

Clause by clause

SELECT DISTINCT status returns the unique values of the status column. DISTINCT deduplicates whatever the SELECT list produces; with a single column, the deduplication is one-dimensional — two rows are duplicates whenever their status matches.
FROM orders is the row source. Every order Brightlane has processed contributes its status value to the candidate set, and the deduplication runs across that whole set.

The pattern is the daily move for the first five minutes with a table you don't know yet. Before writing any filter or join, run SELECT DISTINCT col FROM table on each categorical column to learn the value space. Four values means a tight pipeline with no orphan statuses sneaking in; a fifth value showing up later would mean a new stage in the workflow that the rest of the queries probably haven't accounted for.

You practiced using DISTINCT to discover the active value space of a categorical column. "What values exist" is the everyday data-exploration question — SELECT DISTINCT col FROM table is the one-line answer that scales from four values to four hundred.

Return each status value that appears in the orders table, with no duplicates

The shape

Clause by clause

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