Problem background Imagine this problem. You have a water molecule which is in contact with other molecules (if the contact is a hydrogen bond, there can be 4 other molecules around my water). Like in the following picture (A, B, C, D are some other atoms and dots mean the contact). A B . . O / \ H H . . C D I have the information about all the dots and I need to eliminate the water in the center and create records describing contacts of A-C, A-D, A-B, B-C, B-D, and C-D. Database structure Currently, I have the following structure in the database: Table atoms: "id" integer PRIMARY KEY, "amino" char(3) NOT NULL, (HOH for water or other value) other columns identifying the atom Table contacts: "acceptor_id" integer NOT NULL, (the atom near to my hydrogen, here C or D) "donor_id" integer NOT NULL, (here A or B) "directness" char(1) NOT NULL, (this should be D for direct and W for water-mediated) other columns about the contact, such as the distance Current solution (insufficient) Now, I'm going through all the contacts which have donor.amino = "HOH". In this sample case, this would select contacts from C and D. For each of these selected contacts, I look up contacts having the same acceptor_id as is the donor_id in the currently selected contact. From this information, I create the new contact. At the end, I delete all contacts to or from HOH. This way, I am obviously unable to create C-D and A-B contacts (the other 4 are OK). If I try a similar approach - trying to find two contacts having the same donor_id, I end up with duplicate contacts (C-D and D-C). Is there a simple way to retrieve all six contacts without duplicates? I'm dreaming about some one page long SQL query which retrievs just these six wanted rows. :-) It is preferable to conserve information about who is donor where possible, but not strictly necessary. Big thanks to all of you who read this question to this point.