Help formulatin difficult query

[Anon]

First I will give an example of the table in question.

id | country | reference

1 | UK | 44
2 | UK | 514
3 | UK | 221
4 | USA | 993
5 | USA | 472
6 | USA | 092

I want to write a query that will list every distinct country and will also list any one id along with it. Here is an example of what i would like produced.

id | country

1 | UK

4 | USA

The way i do it at the moment is to issue:
select distict country from table

And then i do the following for every country produced above:

select id from table where country='countryname' limit 1

I'm sure there is a quicker way to do this but I just cannot find it.
Hope somebody can help.

[Anon]

select min(id) as id, country
from tableinquestion
group by country

[[deleted]]

Note that this is the only valid way of using the GROUP BY clause!!

The wrong use of the GROUP BY is demostrated by MySQL (clueless bunch). They will let you do this:

SELECT id, country
FROM table
GROUP BY country;

but this is VERY VERY BAD, INVALID, MYSQL should be castrated for allowing it.
Because there are many 'id' values for each country, and if you only return one country, you must define which of the 'id's you mean.

[Anon]

Thanks man! Simple but inspired