How can I exclude duplicate records from sql query

The explanation for what you are seeing most likely is that the records you are getting back are not duplicates. For example, if you used SELECT *, then you would be getting back all columns, and even though the employee name, id, etc. columns could be identical for multiple records, the other columns might be distinct.

Without knowing your table structure, I cannot give an exact answer. But here are two ways to deal with this. First, you can use SELECT DISTINCT with only columns corresponding to the employee, e.g.

SELECT DISTINCT firstName, lastName, id FROM yourTable 

This has the disadvantage that it throws away information from all the other columns. If you want to retain those other columns, then a second option would be to group records by employee, and then use aggregate functions on the other columns, e.g.

SELECT firstName, lastName, id, MIN(signupTime) FROM yourTable GROUP BY firstName, lastName, id 

In this query, I assumed there is a timestamp column called signupTime, which recorded the time for each employee signup (including possible duplicate signups). This query would retain the first signup time, along with the employee id and name.

Use ROW_NUMBER() for this purpose

;WITH CTE AS ( SELECT *, ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY Name ORDER BY ID) RN FROM Table ) SELECT * FROM CTE WHERE RN=1 

you should grouping them based on fullname, employeeid or whatever... . I have mentioned a simple sample to show you how to use group by command in SQL queries :

SELECT column_name, aggregate_function(column_name) FROM table_name WHERE column_name operator value GROUP BY column_name; 

I hope it works for you.

So by reading the question I assume you just want the same employee name to show up once no matter whether they have registered for more than 1 or 2 events.

For example:

$query_employee = mysql_query("SELECT employee_name, events FROM tbl GROUP BY employee_name");