The Unique tool enables you select one or several columns that should be unique whereby all the duplicate rows are removed.
The Unique tool keeps the first rows that is unique and discards all the
following duplicates
When you select multiple columns, you create column pairs behind the scenes - almost like combining the two (or more) columns into a new column. If you dataset looks like this:
amount
text
100
Hello
200
World
300
World
200
Hello World
100
hello world
There are then three possible options and output:
amount should be unique which outputs the first three rows
text should be unique which outputs the first two rows and last two rows
amount and text should be unique which outputs all five rows
The Unique tool in itself is relatively simple, but its use cases diverse:
You want to remove any duplicate rows, for example duplicate companies from a CRM system
It can be helpful to ensure that you don’t output duplicate records - both for performance and for later use of the data. Use the Unique tool before the Output tool to ensure that there are no duplicate records
It typically a best practice to ensure that you’re joining with at least one unique table in the Combine tool - that Unique tool can help ensure that
Use the Unique tool in combination with the Sort tool to get the maximum value for each of your rows. Sort by some relevant ID (ascending) and the value/date field (descending). Add a Unique tool afterwards and make the dataset unique by the relevant ID you used before. Now you have the largest value or most recent date for each of your rows