A subquery is to put it simply a query within a query. What purpose does a subquery serve?

e? A subquery may be needed when it takes more than a single step to reach the answer. Suppose we need to find all employees who work in the same department as KING. We need to: 1. Find which department KING works for, say D

2. List all employees who work in D More than one step? Subquery at your service!

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SQL> select oe.ename from emp oe 2 where oe.deptno = 3 -- Subquery to get D starts 4 (select ie.deptno 5 from emp ie 6 where ie.ename = 'KING') 7 -- Subquery to get D ends; ENAME ---------CLARK KING MILLER

Types of Subqueries
In terms of the placement of the subquery, there are three types: 1. Nested Subquery: The subquery appears in the WHERE clause of the SQL. 2. Inline View: The subquery appears in the FROM clause of the SQL. 3. Scalar Subquery: The subquery appears in the SELECT clause of the SQL. In terms of the way the subquery is parsed, there are two categories of subqueries: 1. Simple Subquery: This is the kind we saw above. A simple subquery is evaluated once only for each table. 2. Correlated Subquery: This is a type of nested subquery that uses columns from the outer query in its WHERE clause. A correlated subquery is evaluated once for each row. Well look at the types of subqueries in close detail in the upcoming articles on Oratable.

Subquery Tips and Trivia

You cannot have an ORDER BY clause with a nested subquery. See what happens when you try it:
SQL> select oe.ename from emp oe 2 where oe.deptno = 3 -- Subquery starts

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(select ie.deptno from emp ie where ie.ename = 'KING' order by ie.deptno) -- Subquery ends; order by ie.deptno) * ERROR at line 7: ORA-00907: missing right parenthesis

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You can nest as many as 255 levels of subqueries in the WHERE clause. (I hope you never need to hit that limit.) There is no limit on the number of subquery levels in the FROM clause of the top-level query. Get into the habit of using table alias when you use a subquery. Heck, get into the habit of using table aliases anyway they make a world of difference to the readability of huge SQLs. In case of correlated subqueries, they are critical to keep the SQLs accurate.

Oracle resolves unqualified columns in the subquery by first looking at the tables in the subquery, then the tables in the outer query.