How to select rows from a table while ignoring the duplicate field values? Here is an example: id user_id message 1 Adam "Adam is here." 2 Peter "Hi there this is Peter." 3 Peter "I am getting sick." 4 Josh "Oh, snap. I'm on a boat!" 5 Tom "This show is great." 6 Laura "Textmate rocks." What i want to achive is to select the recently active users from my db. Let's say i want to select the 5 recently active users. The problem is, that the following script selects Peter twice. mysql_query("SELECT * FROM messages ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 5 "); What i want is to skip the row when it gets again to Peter, and select the next result, in our case Adam. So i don't want to show my visitors that the recently active users were Laura, Tom, Josh, Peter, and Peter again. That does not make any sense, instead i want to show them this way: Laura, Tom, Josh, Peter, (skipping Peter) and Adam. Is there an SQL command i can use for this problem?