QoQ UNION distincts

Question

What I am trying to do is UNION 2 result sets and only get the distinct values (obviously). The query being ran is:
<cfquery name="qryUseUnits" dbtype="query">
  SELECT OptionDesc,
         OptionValue
  FROM   qryUseUnits
  UNION
  SELECT   Unit AS OptionDesc,
           Unit AS OptionValue
  FROM     qMatSup
  ORDER BY OptionDesc
</cfquery>
In the qryUseUnits table, one of the OptionDesc results is "Cubic Feet" where as for qMatSup, the value is "Cubic feet" (notice the difference in case). So when I dump the results of that query, I will get:
Cubic Feet
Cubic feet
Cubic Meters
The collation on the SQL Server is SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS, and if I were to run this query directly on the server, I get distinct results for sure. However, with the case being different, CF doesn't seem to consider that distinct. Rather than change my SELECT statements to convert all column to upper- or lower-case, is there something different I can do with the query itself to get distinct values regardless of case?

Answer 1

Well, I got it to work as planned. It was a bit cleaner than I had imagined doing it and it works so that's what matters.
What I ended up doing was creating a list of all the "units" that were returned from qryUseUnits. I'd then use this list to determine which values not to select when doing a UNION to qMatSup.
<cfset arMatUnits = listToArray(uCase(valueList(qryUseUnits.OptionValue)))>
<cfquery name="qryUseUnits" dbtype="query">
SELECT OptionDesc,
       OptionValue
FROM   qryUseUnits
UNION
SELECT   Unit AS OptionDesc,
         Unit AS OptionValue
FROM     qMatSup
WHERE UPPER(Unit) NOT IN (<cfqueryparam value="#listAppend(arrayToList(arMatUnits), 0)#" list="true" cfsqltype="CF_SQL_VARCHAR">)
</cfquery>