This blog is the first part of a two-articles series. In this article, I’m going to introduce the Common Table Expression (CTE), a new feature available on MySQL 8.0, as well as Percona Server for MySQL 8.

What is a Common Table Expression?

We can define a CTE as an alternative to a derived table. In a small way, CTE simplifies complex joins and subqueries, improving the readability of the queries. CTE is part of ANSI SQL 99 and was introduced in MySQL 8.0.1. The same feature is available even on Percona Server for MySQL 8.0.

The main reasons for using CTE are:

• Better readability of the queries
• Can be referenced multiple times in the same query
• Improved performance
• A valid alternative to a VIEW, if your user cannot create VIEWs
• Easier chaining of multiple CTE …

In this blog post, we’ll look at a solving Sudoku using MySQL 8.0 recursive common table expression.

Vadim was recently having a little Saturday morning fun solving Sudoku using MySQL 8. The whole idea comes from SQLite, where Richard Hipp has come up with some outlandish recursive query examples — WITH clause.

The SQLite query:

WITH RECURSIVE
 input(sud) AS (
   VALUES('53..7....6..195....98....6.8...6...34..8.3..17...2...6.6....28....419..5....8..79')
 ),
 digits(z, lp) AS (
   VALUES('1', 1)
   UNION ALL SELECT
   CAST(lp+1 AS TEXT), lp+1 FROM digits WHERE lp<9
 ),
 x(s, ind) AS (
   SELECT sud, instr(sud, '.') FROM input
   UNION ALL
   SELECT …