Laravel Eloquent - distinct() and count() not working properly together

A more generic answer that would have saved me time, and hopefully others:

Does not work (returns count of all rows):

DB::table('users')
            ->select('first_name')
            ->distinct()
            ->count();

The fix:

DB::table('users')
            ->distinct()
            ->count('first_name');

The following should work

$ad->getcodes()->distinct()->count('pid');

Anyone else come across this post, and not finding the other suggestions to work?

Depending on the specific query, a different approach may be needed. In my case, I needed either count the results of a GROUP BY, e.g.

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM (SELECT * FROM a GROUP BY b)

or use COUNT(DISTINCT b):

SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT b) FROM a

After some puzzling around, I realised there was no built-in Laravel function for either of these. So the simplest solution was to use use DB::raw with the count method.

$count = $builder->count(DB::raw('DISTINCT b'));

Remember, don't use groupBy before calling count. You can apply groupBy later, if you need it for getting rows.

You can use the following way to get the unique data as per your need as follows,

$data = $ad->getcodes()->get()->unique('email');

$count = $data->count();

Hope this will work.