A method, apparatus, and stored instructions are provided for the removal of redundant GROUP BY and/or DISTINCT. Every table in the FROM clause of the query block must be a qualified table for the GROUP-BY clause or the DISTINCT keyword in the SELECT clause of the query block to be removed. A table Tx that satisfies at least one of the following two conditions is referred to as a qualified table: (1) Tx has a non-null unique column Tx.u that appears on the GROUP BY clause or the SELECT clause that contains a DISTINCT keyword and (2) There is a qualified table Ty and Ty has a filtering join with Tx.