SQL Left Join first match only

Question

I have a query against a large number of big tables (rows and columns) with a number of joins, however one of tables has some duplicate rows of data causing issues for my query. Since this is a read only realtime feed from another department I can't fix that data, however I am trying to prevent issues in my query from it.

Given that, I need to add this crap data as a left join to my good query. The data set looks like:

IDNo    FirstName   LastName    ...
-------------------------------------------
uqx     bob     smith
abc     john        willis
ABC     john        willis
aBc     john        willis
WTF     jeff        bridges
sss     bill        doe
ere     sally       abby
wtf     jeff        bridges
...

(about 2 dozen columns, and 100K rows)

My first instinct was to perform a distinct gave me about 80K rows:

SELECT DISTINCT P.IDNo
FROM people P

But when I try the following, I get all the rows back:

SELECT DISTINCT P.*
FROM people P

OR

SELECT 
    DISTINCT(P.IDNo) AS IDNoUnq 
    ,P.FirstName
    ,P.LastName
    ...etc.    
FROM people P

I then thought I would do a FIRST() aggregate function on all the columns, however that feels wrong too. Syntactically am I doing something wrong here?

Update: Just wanted to note: These records are duplicates based on a non-key / non-indexed field of ID listed above. The ID is a text field which although has the same value, it is a different case than the other data causing the issue.

Answer 1

Turns out I was doing it wrong, I needed to perform a nested select first of just the important columns, and do a distinct select off that to prevent trash columns of 'unique' data from corrupting my good data. The following appears to have resolved the issue... but I will try on the full dataset later.

SELECT DISTINCT P2.*
FROM (
  SELECT
      IDNo
    , FirstName
    , LastName
  FROM people P
) P2

Here is some play data as requested: http://sqlfiddle.com/#!3/050e0d/3

CREATE TABLE people
(
       [entry] int
     , [IDNo] varchar(3)
     , [FirstName] varchar(5)
     , [LastName] varchar(7)
);

INSERT INTO people
    (entry,[IDNo], [FirstName], [LastName])
VALUES
    (1,'uqx', 'bob', 'smith'),
    (2,'abc', 'john', 'willis'),
    (3,'ABC', 'john', 'willis'),
    (4,'aBc', 'john', 'willis'),
    (5,'WTF', 'jeff', 'bridges'),
    (6,'Sss', 'bill', 'doe'),
    (7,'sSs', 'bill', 'doe'),
    (8,'ssS', 'bill', 'doe'),
    (9,'ere', 'sally', 'abby'),
    (10,'wtf', 'jeff', 'bridges')
;