The standard SQL WITH clause has been tremendously helpful in structuring SQL queries. Instead of nesting everything in unreadable derived tables like this: SELECT actor_id, name, COUNT(*) FROM ( SELECT actor_id, first_name || ' ' || last_name AS name FROM actor ) AS a JOIN film_actor AS fa USING (actor_id) GROUP BY actor_id, name ORDER … Continue reading LATERAL is Your Friend to Create Local Column Variables in SQL
Tag: OUTER APPLY
How to Write Multiset Conditions With Oracle VARRAY Types
Oracle is one of the few databases that implements the SQL standard ORDBMS extensions, which essentially allow for nested collections. Other databases that have these features to some extent are CUBRID, Informix, PostgreSQL. Oracle has two types of nested collections: -- Nested tables CREATE TYPE t1 AS TABLE OF VARCHAR2(10); / -- Varrays CREATE TYPE … Continue reading How to Write Multiset Conditions With Oracle VARRAY Types
How to Write Efficient TOP N Queries in SQL
A very common type of SQL query is the TOP-N query, where we need the "TOP N" records ordered by some value, possibly per category. In this blog post, we're going to look into a variety of different aspects to this problem, as well as how to solve them with standard and non-standard SQL. These … Continue reading How to Write Efficient TOP N Queries in SQL
How to Generate at Least One Row in SQL
There are some situations where you would like to have at least one (empty) row in your result set in SQL. Imagine the following situation. We're querying the Sakila database for actors and their films: SELECT first_name, last_name, title FROM actor JOIN film_actor USING (actor_id) JOIN film USING (film_id) ORDER BY 1, 2, 3 yielding … Continue reading How to Generate at Least One Row in SQL
jOOQ Newsletter: December 30, 2013. Happy New Year!
subscribe to the newsletter here Tweet of the Day We would like to contribute this new section of the newsletter to our followers, users, and customers. Here's Andy Van Den Heuvel, who appreciates jOOQ's and MyBatis' (both being "post-JPA" frameworks) return to SQL. https://twitter.com/andyvdh7/status/416685921288093696 2013 from jOOQ's perspective 2013 was a very exciting year for jOOQ and jOOQ customers. … Continue reading jOOQ Newsletter: December 30, 2013. Happy New Year!
Add LATERAL Joins or CROSS APPLY to Your SQL Tool Chain
The T-SQL dialect has known the powerful CROSS APPLY and OUTER APPLY JOIN syntaxes for ages. The SQL:1999 standard had introduced almost equivalent "lateral derived tables", which are finally supported with PostgreSQL 9.3, or Oracle 12c, which has adopted both the SQL standard LATERAL syntax and the T-SQL vendor-specific CROSS APPLY and OUTER APPLY syntaxes. … Continue reading Add LATERAL Joins or CROSS APPLY to Your SQL Tool Chain
Oracle 12c Goodies: { CROSS | OUTER } APPLY
I can't believe my eyes. Has this been openly communicated by Oracle? I haven't seen too many blog posts on that matter. Apart from introducing the awesome SQL Standard OFFSET .. FETCH clause (just like SQL Server 2012), there seems to be now also { CROSS | OUTER } APPLY in Oracle 12c! Check out the … Continue reading Oracle 12c Goodies: { CROSS | OUTER } APPLY