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Identifying duplicate rows
It is possible to determine duplicate rows using the select with a count of all the rows which have the same values in the 'unique' fields as follows :
select a,b,count(*)
from test
group by a,b
having count(*) > 1;
The above script will produce an output something like the following :
A B COUNT(*)
---------- ---------- ----------
1 2 259
2 2 5
From this we can see that the so-called unique columns a and b in this table are nowhere near unique. We need to get rid of 258 and 4 rows respectively to make the table properly unique. See below for a couple of methods of how to do the deletions.