how to write a statement to accomplish the folowing? lets say a table has 2 columns (both are nvarchar) with the following data col1 10000_10000_10001_10002_10002_10002 col2 10____20____10____30____40_____50 I'd like to keep only the following data: col1 10000_10001_10002 col2 10____10____30 thus removing the duplicates based on the second column values (neither of the columns are primary keys), keeping only those records with the minimal value in the second column. how to accomplish this?