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LATERAL and APPLY

Published 2022-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Lukas Eder shows off one of my favorite operators:

The SQL:1999 standard specifies the <lateral derived table>, which is SQL’s way of allowing for a derived table (a subquery in the FROM clause) to access all the lexically preceding objects in the FROM clause. It’s a bit weird in terms of syntax, I personally think that Microsoft SQL Server has a much nicer solution for this concept via APPLY. Oracle supports both syntaxes (standard and T-SQL’s). Db2, Firebird, MySQL, PostgreSQL only have LATERAL.

Click through to see how the operator works.

Published in Syntax and T-SQL