SQL - select distinct only on one column

Question

I have searched far and wide for an answer to this problem. I'm using a Microsoft SQL Server, suppose I have a table that looks like this:

+--------+---------+-------------+-------------+
| ID     | NUMBER  | COUNTRY     | LANG        |
+--------+---------+-------------+-------------+
| 1      | 3968    | UK          | English     |
| 2      | 3968    | Spain       | Spanish     |
| 3      | 3968    | USA         | English     |
| 4      | 1234    | Greece      | Greek       |
| 5      | 1234    | Italy       | Italian     |

I want to perform one query which only selects the unique 'NUMBER' column (whether is be the first or last row doesn't bother me). So this would give me:

+--------+---------+-------------+-------------+
| ID     | NUMBER  | COUNTRY     | LANG        |
+--------+---------+-------------+-------------+
| 1      | 3968    | UK          | English     |
| 4      | 1234    | Greece      | Greek       |

How is this achievable?

Answer 1

Since you don't care, I chose the max ID for each number.

select tbl.* from tbl
inner join (
select max(id) as maxID, number from tbl group by number) maxID
on maxID.maxID = tbl.id

---

Query Explanation

 select 
    tbl.*  -- give me all the data from the base table (tbl) 
 from 
    tbl    
    inner join (  -- only return rows in tbl which match this subquery
        select 
            max(id) as maxID -- MAX (ie distinct) ID per GROUP BY below
        from 
            tbl 
        group by 
            NUMBER            -- how to group rows for the MAX aggregation
    ) maxID
        on maxID.maxID = tbl.id -- join condition ie only return rows in tbl 
                                -- whose ID is also a MAX ID for a given NUMBER