First off, I was having someone assist with some data entry and long story short they copied the whole database from the network location and pasted it to their computer instead of using the short cut. Shame on them. I don't know exactly how long this went on but there ended up being quite a bit of information that we needed to get to the real database. So I basically ended up appending it to the appropriate table in the actual DB. Very, very dumb thing to do. Shame on me. We now have duplicate entries. About 90,000 of them. So I thought a good idea would be to run a find duplicates query. And then maybe a delete query to get rid of them (the duplicates returned by that query). Doesn't work that way apparently. I googled this issue and I searched the forums and I followed the directions but it's not working, or my understanding of how this needs to proceed is flawed maybe.
Whatever the case may be, I can get the find duplicates query to work- I run the query and it returns the records that are duplicates. Great. However, the delete operation fails horribly (or succeeds depending on how you look at it). I made a copy of the table to do a dry run, and well the query doesn't just delete duplicates. It purges out the entire table.
So can someone explain maybe how the delete query works? I believe that's where my issue is