What's faster, SELECT DISTINCT or GROUP BY in MySQL?

They are essentially equivalent to each other (in fact this is how some databases implement DISTINCT under the hood).

If one of them is faster, it's going to be DISTINCT. This is because, although the two are the same, a query optimizer would have to catch the fact that your GROUP BY is not taking advantage of any group members, just their keys. DISTINCT makes this explicit, so you can get away with a slightly dumber optimizer.

When in doubt, test!

If you have an index on profession, these two are synonyms.

If you don't, then use DISTINCT.

GROUP BY in MySQL sorts results. You can even do:

SELECT u.profession FROM users u GROUP BY u.profession DESC

and get your professions sorted in DESC order.

DISTINCT creates a temporary table and uses it for storing duplicates. GROUP BY does the same, but sortes the distinct results afterwards.

So

SELECT DISTINCT u.profession FROM users u

is faster, if you don't have an index on profession.

All of the answers above are correct, for the case of DISTINCT on a single column vs GROUP BY on a single column. Every db engine has its own implementation and optimizations, and if you care about the very little difference (in most cases) then you have to test against specific server AND specific version! As implementations may change...

BUT, if you select more than one column in the query, then the DISTINCT is essentially different! Because in this case it will compare ALL columns of all rows, instead of just one column.

So if you have something like:

// This will NOT return unique by [id], but unique by (id,name)
SELECT DISTINCT id, name FROM some_query_with_joins

// This will select unique by [id].
SELECT id, name FROM some_query_with_joins GROUP BY id

It is a common mistake to think that DISTINCT keyword distinguishes rows by the first column you specified, but the DISTINCT is a general keyword in this manner.

So people you have to be careful not to take the answers above as correct for all cases... You might get confused and get the wrong results while all you wanted was to optimize!