Summary: in this tutorial, you will learn about the SQL subquery and how to use the subqueries to form flexible SQL statements.
Consider the following employees and departments tables from the sample database:
Suppose you have to find all employees who locate in the location with the id 1700. You might come up with the following solution.
First, find all departments located at the location whose id is 1700:
SELECT * FROM departments WHERE location_id = 1700; Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)
Second, find all employees that belong to the location 1700 by using the department id list of the previous query:
SELECT employee_id, first_name, last_name FROM employees WHERE department_id IN (1 , 3, 8, 10, 11) ORDER BY first_name , last_name;Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)
This solution has two problems. To start with, you have looked at the departments table to check which department belongs to the location 1700. However, the original question was not referring to any specific departments; it referred to the location 1700.
Because of the small data volume, you can get a list of department easily. However, in the real system with high volume data, it might be problematic.
Another problem was that you have to revise the queries whenever you want to find employees who locate in a different location.
A much better solution to this problem is to use a subquery. By definition, a subquery is a query nested inside another query such as SELECT , INSERT , UPDATE , or DELETE statement. In this tutorial, we are focusing on the subquery used with the SELECT statement.
In this example, you can rewrite combine the two queries above as follows:
SELECT employee_id, first_name, last_name FROM employees WHERE department_id IN (SELECT department_id FROM departments WHERE location_id = 1700) ORDER BY first_name , last_name;Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)The query placed within the parentheses is called a subquery. It is also known as an inner query or inner select. The query that contains the subquery is called an outer query or an outer select.
To execute the query, first, the database system has to execute the subquery and substitute the subquery between the parentheses with its result – a number of department id located at the location 1700 – and then executes the outer query.
You can use a subquery in many places such as:
Let’s take some examples of using the subqueries to understand how they work.
In the previous example, you have seen how the subquery was used with the IN operator. The following example uses a subquery with the NOT IN operator to find all employees who do not locate at the location 1700:
SELECT employee_id, first_name, last_name FROM employees WHERE department_id NOT IN (SELECT department_id FROM departments WHERE location_id = 1700) ORDER BY first_name , last_name;Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)
The following syntax illustrates how a subquery is used with a comparison operator:
comparison_operator (subquery) Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)where the comparison operator is one of these operators:
The following example finds the employees who have the highest salary:
SELECT employee_id, first_name, last_name, salary FROM employees WHERE salary = (SELECT MAX(salary) FROM employees) ORDER BY first_name , last_name;Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)
In this example, the subquery returns the highest salary of all employees and the outer query finds the employees whose salary is equal to the highest one.
The following statement finds all employees who salaries are greater than the average salary of all employees:
SELECT employee_id, first_name, last_name, salary FROM employees WHERE salary > (SELECT AVG(salary) FROM employees); Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)
In this example, first, the subquery returns the average salary of all employees. Then, the outer query uses the greater than operator to find all employees whose salaries are greater than the average.
The EXISTS operator checks for the existence of rows returned from the subquery. It returns true if the subquery contains any rows. Otherwise, it returns false.
The syntax of the EXISTS operator is as follows:
EXISTS (subquery ) Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)The NOT EXISTS operator is opposite to the EXISTS operator.
NOT EXISTS (subquery) Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)The following example finds all departments which have at least one employee with the salary is greater than 10,000:
SELECT department_name FROM departments d WHERE EXISTS( SELECT 1 FROM employees e WHERE salary > 10000 AND e.department_id = d.department_id) ORDER BY department_name; Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)Similarly, the following statement finds all departments that do not have any employee with the salary greater than 10,000:
SELECT department_name FROM departments d WHERE NOT EXISTS( SELECT 1 FROM employees e WHERE salary > 10000 AND e.department_id = d.department_id) ORDER BY department_name; Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)The syntax of the subquery when it is used with the ALL operator is as follows:
comparison_operator ALL (subquery) Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)The following condition evaluates to true if x is greater than every value returned by the subquery.
x > ALL (subquery) Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)For example, suppose the subquery returns three value one, two, and three. The following condition evaluates to true if x is greater than 3.
x > ALL (1,2,3) Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)The following query uses the GROUP BY clause and MIN() function to find the lowest salary by department:
SELECT MIN(salary) FROM employees GROUP BY department_id ORDER BY MIN(salary) DESC; Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)The following example finds all employees whose salaries are greater than the lowest salary of every department:
SELECT employee_id, first_name, last_name, salary FROM employees WHERE salary >= ALL (SELECT MIN(salary) FROM employees GROUP BY department_id) ORDER BY first_name , last_name;Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)
The following shows the syntax of a subquery with the ANY operator:
comparison_operator ANY (subquery) Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)For example, the following condition evaluates to true if x is greater than any value returned by the subquery. So the condition x > SOME (1,2,3) evaluates to true if x is greater than 1.
x > ANY (subquery)Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)Note that the SOME operator is a synonym for the ANY operator so you can use them interchangeably.
The following query finds all employees whose salaries are greater than or equal to the highest salary of every department.
SELECT employee_id, first_name, last_name, salary FROM employees WHERE salary >= SOME (SELECT MAX(salary) FROM employees GROUP BY department_id); Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)
In this example, the subquery finds the highest salary of employees in each department. The outer query looks at these values and determines which employee’s salaries are greater than or equal to any highest salary by department.
You can use a subquery in the FROM clause of the SELECT statement as follows:
SELECT * FROM (subquery) AS table_name Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)In this syntax, the table alias is mandatory because all tables in the FROM clause must have a name.
Note that the subquery specified in the FROM clause is called a derived table in MySQL or inline view in Oracle.
The following statement returns the average salary of every department:
SELECT AVG(salary) average_salary FROM employees GROUP BY department_id; Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)You can use this query as a subquery in the FROM clause to calculate the average of average salary of departments as follows:
SELECT ROUND(AVG(average_salary), 0) FROM (SELECT AVG(salary) average_salary FROM employees GROUP BY department_id) department_salary; Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)
A subquery can be used anywhere an expression can be used in the SELECT clause. The following example finds the salaries of all employees, their average salary, and the difference between the salary of each employee and the average salary.
SELECT employee_id, first_name, last_name, salary, (SELECT ROUND(AVG(salary), 0) FROM employees) average_salary, salary - (SELECT ROUND(AVG(salary), 0) FROM employees) difference FROM employees ORDER BY first_name , last_name;Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)
Now you should understand what an SQL subquery is and how to use subqueries to form flexible SQL statements.
