select only one column, not the whole record

Hi folks,

Is it possible to select only 1 column out of a table and not the
whole record? More specifically, what I really need is the following:

SELECT DISTINCT column FROM table;

The point is that I only need DISTINCT values and if I can't select 1
column only then I can't use DISTINCT because generally full records
are never the same but the value in 'column' might be repeated. So I
would need to select everything and filter through the data in python
which would be a huge performance hit.

Cheers,
Daniel

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