When converting DISTINCT to GROUP BY where the columns are from the covering
index and they are quoted twice in the SELECT list the optimizer is creating
improper processing sequence. This is because of the fact that the columns
of the covering index are not recognized as such and treated as non-index
columns.

Generally speaking duplicate columns can safely be removed from the GROUP
BY/DISTINCT list because this will not add or remove new rows in the
resulting set. Duplicates can be removed even if they are not consecutive
(as is the case for ORDER BY, where the duplicate columns can be removed
only if they are consecutive).

So we can safely transform "SELECT DISTINCT a,a FROM ... ORDER BY a" to
"SELECT a,a FROM ... GROUP BY a ORDER BY a" instead of 
"SELECT a,a FROM .. GROUP BY a,a ORDER BY a". We can even transform 
"SELECT DISTINCT a,b,a FROM ... ORDER BY a,b" to
"SELECT a,b,a FROM ... GROUP BY a,b ORDER BY a,b".

The fix to this bug consists of checking for duplicate columns in the SELECT
list when constructing the GROUP BY list in transforming DISTINCT to GROUP
BY and skipping the ones that are already in.