I would love to have a feature that would search a given table by a field or set of fields to find and surface duplicate rows. It would then be great to be able to take a pre-defined action on duplicated rows such as delete, or merge. Dealing with dupes is always a pain with large data sets or importing new data into a set where some records may already exist. A way to deal with dupes in a somewhat automated way would be really helpful.
You could find duplicate rows by using a formula field to concatenate the fields you want to match by and then Grouping a view based upon the formula field. You could then simply look through the data and find any group with more than one record in and act accordingly. Data reduplication is very often NOT an exact science - you may have to manually edit data from one record to another for example - so this is quite a reasonable approach.
If only you could filter by groups with a record count of > 1!
I’m using a calculated field for my primary key, concatenating a few other fields. I would have thought that Airtable would throw an error, or at least not store duplicate records when the primary key is the same.
This is totally opposite the way other RDBMSs work. The primary has to be unique.
In Airtable, there’s no such thing as using a field for “your” primary key. Airtable uses an internal field that is not visible through the user interface but is accessible through the API.
The first field at the left in Grid View is not the primary key. It’s what shows up in a linked record and it can be changed without affecting the link. There’s no need for it to be unique.
I see people are still suffering because of this, so I want to bring up this suggestion which didn’t seem to get much attention and it will absolutely help those who really need to find [at least some kind of] duplicates with some ease.
As with lots of other issues this ia longly requested one.
I’ll add my +1 also by making a suggestion: How about allowing to filter grouped results.
Example: If I group by an email field in a table of 5000 entries with 10 duplicates, i can find duplicate email entries but I have to scroll through 4990 grouped rows. If I would be able to filter out grouped results with a result count <= 1 this could be much easier.
