Retaining earliest instances of duplicate entries from a table We have a situation where duplicate entries have crept into our table with more than 60 million entries (duplicate here implies that all fields, except the AUTO_INCREMENT index field have the same value).  We suspect that there are about 2 million duplicate entries in the table.  We would like to delete these duplicate entries such that the earliest instances of the duplicate entries are retained.
Let me explain with an illustrative table:
CREATE TABLE people
(
id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
name VARCHAR(40) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
age INT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
phrase VARCHAR(40) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
PRIMARY KEY (id)
);

INSERT INTO people(name, age, phrase) VALUES ('John Doe', 25, 'qwert'), ('William Smith', 19, 'yuiop'),
('Peter Jones', 19, 'yuiop'), ('Ronnie Arbuckle', 32, 'asdfg'), ('Ronnie Arbuckle', 32, 'asdfg'),
('Mary Evans', 18, 'hjklp'), ('Mary Evans', 18, 'hjklpd'), ('John Doe', 25, 'qwert');

SELECT * FROM people;
+----+-----------------+-----+--------+
| id | name            | age | phrase |
+----+-----------------+-----+--------+
|  1 | John Doe        |  25 | qwert  |
|  2 | William Smith   |  19 | yuiop  |
|  3 | Peter Jones     |  19 | yuiop  |
|  4 | Ronnie Arbuckle |  32 | asdfg  |
|  5 | Ronnie Arbuckle |  32 | asdfg  |
|  6 | Mary Evans      |  18 | hjklp  |
|  7 | Mary Evans      |  18 | hjklpd |
|  8 | John Doe        |  25 | qwert  |
+----+-----------------+-----+--------+

We would like to remove duplicate entries so that we get the following output:
SELECT * FROM people;
+----+-----------------+-----+--------+
| id | name            | age | phrase |
+----+-----------------+-----+--------+
|  1 | John Doe        |  25 | qwert  |
|  2 | William Smith   |  19 | yuiop  |
|  3 | Peter Jones     |  19 | yuiop  |
|  4 | Ronnie Arbuckle |  32 | asdfg  |
|  6 | Mary Evans      |  18 | hjklp  |
|  7 | Mary Evans      |  18 | hjklpd |
+----+-----------------+-----+--------+

On smaller sized tables the following approach would work:
CREATE TABLE people_uniq LIKE people;

INSERT INTO people_uniq SELECT * FROM people GROUP BY name, age, phrase;

DROP TABLE people;

RENAME TABLE people_uniq TO people;

SELECT * FROM people;
+----+-----------------+-----+--------+
| id | name            | age | phrase |
+----+-----------------+-----+--------+
|  1 | John Doe        |  25 | qwert  |
|  2 | William Smith   |  19 | yuiop  |
|  3 | Peter Jones     |  19 | yuiop  |
|  4 | Ronnie Arbuckle |  32 | asdfg  |
|  6 | Mary Evans      |  18 | hjklp  |
|  7 | Mary Evans      |  18 | hjklpd |
+----+-----------------+-----+--------+


Kindly suggest a solution that would scale to a table with tens of millions of entries and many more columns.  We are using MySQL version 5.6.49.
DELETE t1
FROM people t1
JOIN people t2 USING (name,age,phrase)
WHERE t1.id &gt; t2.id;

fiddle

PS. None column is indexed now - so on 60kk table this query may be infinite with high probability. Create an index at least by the most variable column (I'd prefer phrase) including id, i.e.
CREATE INDEX idx_name
ON people (phrase, id);

Of course the best option is to create an index by (phrase, name, age, id).

Alternatively you may gather id values to be deleted into temporary table and then delete them:
CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE tmp (id INT PRIMARY KEY)
SELECT t1.id
FROM people t1
JOIN people t2 USING (name,age,phrase)
WHERE t1.id &gt; t2.id;

DELETE people
FROM people
JOIN tmp USING (id);

This may be faster then the former method. And the same index creation will improve.
fiddle