We had a query retrieving data from a linked Oracle server. We needed unique rows only. This is the original query:
SELECT Column FROM OPENQUERY( LinkedServer, 'SELECT DISTINCT Column from TABLE;' );
However, this still returned some duplicates despite using DISTINCT. As it turned out, some rows had a new line character in them. The solution:
SELECT distinct replace(replace(Column,CHAR(13),''),CHAR(10),'') FROM OPENQUERY( LinkedServer, 'SELECT DISTINCT Column from TABLE;' )