DISTINCT statement help

[MersenneTwister]

Hi, this will probably sound like a very simple SQL question, but I can't seem to figure it out...
So let's say I have a statement:

SELECT DISTINCT date, rate from...where...

So I know this statement will retrieve only unique combinations of both date and rate, but what I want is to retrieve the entries with the unique dates only and also the rates corresponding to each unique date, but not unique combinations of the two.
Thanks.

 

[swampBoogie]

If you have the data

dateColumn | rateColumn
------------------
2006-04-23 | 1234
2006-04-23 | 5678

what result do you want? It is not clear from your post.