If you have been using certain DBMSs, or reading recent versions of the SQL standard, you are probably aware of the so-called “WITH clause” of SQL.
Some call it Subquery Factoring. Others call it Common Table Expression. A form of the WITH CLAUSE, “WITH RECURSIVE”, allows to design a recursive query: a query which repeats itself again and again, each time using the results of the previous iteration. This can be quite useful to produce reports based on hierarchical data. And thus is an alternative to Oracle’s CONNECT BY. MySQL does not natively support WITH RECURSIVE, but it is easy to emulate it with a generic, reusable stored procedure. Read the full article …

[2017 update: MySQL 8.0.1 now features SQL-standard CTE syntax; more information is here ; the entry below, from 2013, shows how to work around the absence of CTEs in older MySQL versions.]

If you have been using certain DBMSs, or reading recent versions of the SQL standard, you are probably aware of the so-called "WITH clause" of SQL.
Some call it Subquery Factoring. Others call it Common Table Expression (CTE). In its simplest form, this feature is a kind of "boosted derived table".

Assume that a table T1 has three columns:

CREATE TABLE T1(
YEAR …