I have two selects that I'm currently running as a UNION successfully.

```
(SELECT a.user_id,
          a.updatecontents AS city,
          b.country
   FROM userprofiletemp AS a
   LEFT JOIN userattributes AS b ON a.user_id=b.user_id
   WHERE typeofupdate='city')
UNION DISTINCT
  (SELECT a.user_id,
          c.city,
          c.country
   FROM userverify AS a
   LEFT JOIN userlogin AS b ON a.user_id=b.user_id
   LEFT JOIN userattributes AS c ON a.user_id=c.user_id
   WHERE b.active=1
     AND a.verifycity=0);

```

The results come back like this:

```
100 Melbourne Australia
200 NewYork America
300 Tokyo Japan
100 Sydney Australia

```

The catch is the query will bring duplicate user\_id (in this case the 100).
The details in the first query take precedent for me and if the user\_id is repeated in the second query I don't need it.

Is there a way to get a UNION to be DISTINCT on a column? in this case the user\_id?
Is there a way to do the above call and not get duplicate user\_id's - drop the second.
Should I re-write the query differently and not use a UNION.
Really want it as one query - I can use to SELECT's and PHP to weed out duplicate if necessary.

thx
Adam