Processing Order

Video Transcription

Welcome back, everyone. So this will be our last little video for our single table queries part one series. But in this video, we’ll talk about processing order of our query. Now, before I talked a little bit about how our SQL language is not a procedural language, so we’re not going step by step, line by line from line one to line x, in order that they actually happen. So there’s a different processing order that actually happens than what’s actually shown on the screen. So we talked a lot about the major elements of select, and we’ll talk more about the SELECT query. Later in this class, we’ll add some more elements to it. But the core bits here are SELECT FROM WHERE group by and having are the ones that we’ve talked about so far. Now, the order is not the order that they are shown here on the screen, it does not go from SELECT FROM WHERE group by having, we actually go to the from clause first.

So we need to know the source of our data before we can do before we can do anything, right. And we know nothing until we know where the source is from. Now, I can do the slug claws before without any of the things underneath it, right. So if we just have select by itself, of course, the slug will actually be will be done first. But if we if we have select and other things, select is not the first thing, right? So from this data source, so from XYZ table, where, right, so we filter out the rows from that table, right? So from Table A, we want only the rows that match this particular condition. And then we can then group those rows together by a certain condition, right. So group by color, right? Having, let’s say a count of 10, right. And then we actually select right, we actually do the actual projection. So remember, all of all of this here from where group by and having are all part of the selection operation. And then the select is the projection, right? Select is the which columns are vertically, which things are we actually going to show the forum were grouped by having are all horizontal, so which rows are we going to show, so we pick the rows that we want first, and then we pick the columns from those rows that we want.

But this is really going to be something that I will really work on and repeat quite often in these videos is the processing order because it is not intuitive. When you first start reading SQL, that it is not the order that you read it in that it operates in, it’s a different processing order, it executes in a different order than what is actually shown there on the screen. And just as a review, here, this is just a friendly slide help remind you of all of the different syntax that we actually covered here for our simple single table query. So we have the SELECT clause, and then from were grouped by having this is the typical typical ordering that you’ll actually see them written in and of course that’ll be talked about just before that actually operates executes from where group by having and then select. Now, any one of these down here are optional, right I can have a From clause and not a where clause, but a group by I can have a group by without having, I cannot have a having clause without group by though, having the having clause must be paired with the grouping, because the having is an aggregate filter, not a row by row filter. That is one limitation of the syntax there. But that really concludes the first part of our simple table queries. This is the first part of a three part series that we’ll be talking about, for doing single table queries. I will see you in the next video.