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LATERAL
Supported by ✅ Open Source Edition ✅ Express Edition ✅ Professional Edition ✅ Enterprise Edition
                                                
LATERAL is a SQL standard table operator to wrap derived tables (or other table expressions, in some dialects), such that the tables and columns declared before the LATERAL derived table become in scope. See APPLY for an alternative, SQL Server specific syntax.
                                            
An example:
SELECT *
FROM
  AUTHOR,
  -- All previous objects (i.e. AUTHOR)
  -- are now in scope for the following subquery
  LATERAL (
    SELECT count(*)
    FROM BOOK
    WHERE BOOK.AUTHOR_ID = AUTHOR.ID -- AUTHOR is in scope
  );
DSL.using(configuration)
   .select()
   .from(
      AUTHOR,
      lateral(
        select(count()
        .from(BOOK)
        .where(BOOK.AUTHOR_ID.eq(AUTHOR.ID)))
      )
   )
   .fetch();
This is most useful for:
- TOP N per category queries, which are harder to implement otherwise
- Local column variables
- Calling table valued functions on a row-by-row basis
Dialect support
This example using jOOQ:
select().from(AUTHOR, lateral(selectCount().from(BOOK).where(BOOK.AUTHOR_ID.eq(AUTHOR.ID))))
Translates to the following dialect specific expressions:
Aurora Postgres, CockroachDB, DB2, Databricks, Firebird, Hana, MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, Snowflake, Sybase, Trino, YugabyteDB
SELECT
  AUTHOR.ID,
  AUTHOR.FIRST_NAME,
  AUTHOR.LAST_NAME,
  AUTHOR.DATE_OF_BIRTH,
  AUTHOR.YEAR_OF_BIRTH,
  AUTHOR.DISTINGUISHED,
  alias_124651337.count
FROM
  AUTHOR,
  LATERAL (
    SELECT count(*)
    FROM BOOK
    WHERE BOOK.AUTHOR_ID = AUTHOR.ID
  ) alias_124651337
SQLDataWarehouse, SQLServer
SELECT
  AUTHOR.ID,
  AUTHOR.FIRST_NAME,
  AUTHOR.LAST_NAME,
  AUTHOR.DATE_OF_BIRTH,
  AUTHOR.YEAR_OF_BIRTH,
  AUTHOR.DISTINGUISHED,
  alias_124651337.count
FROM AUTHOR
  CROSS APPLY (
    SELECT count(*)
    FROM BOOK
    WHERE BOOK.AUTHOR_ID = AUTHOR.ID
  ) alias_124651337
ASE, Access, Aurora MySQL, BigQuery, ClickHouse, DuckDB, Exasol, H2, HSQLDB, Informix, MariaDB, MemSQL, Redshift, SQLite, Spanner, Teradata, Vertica
/* UNSUPPORTED */
Generated with jOOQ 3.21. Support in older jOOQ versions may differ. Translate your own SQL on our website

 
        
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