Infrequent SQL developers often get confused about when to put parentheses and/or aliases on derived tables. There has been this recent Reddit discussion about the subject, where user Elmhurstlol was wondering why they needed to provide an alias to the derived table (the subselect with the UNION) in the following query: SELECT AVG(price) AS AVG_PRICE … Continue reading Should I Put That Table Alias or Not? →

In my database class, students write solutions as group exercises against the Oracle 11g XE database and then they port the solution individually to the MySQL 5.5 database. One of the students copied over a query like the one below to MySQL (a query used to track the expected number of row returns).

SELECT   COUNT(*)
FROM    (SELECT   DISTINCT
                  k.kingdom_id
         ,        kki.kingdom_name
         ,        kki.population
         FROM     kingdom_knight_import kki LEFT JOIN kingdom k
         ON       kki.kingdom_name = k.kingdom_name
         AND      kki.population = k.population);

It got an error they didn’t understand:

ERROR 1248 (42000): Every derived TABLE must have its own alias

Providing a dt query alias fixes the problem in MySQL for the following query. The fact that it was just an alias was a revelation to the student. That’s because Oracle databases don’t require aliases …

Last week I was working on one of the issue where the sub-query related to OLAP staging was running for about 2+ hours in the production server and finally nailed down to get the query to run in < 7 secs. It was bit interesting and kind of known issue in MySQL sub-queries world and one of the limitation from MySQL on giving more control over derived table results.

Sometimes we can re-write the sub-queries so that there is no derived tables complexity involved; but the bad part is; this particular sub-query is part of an UPDATE statement; so not all sub-queries can be re-written especially when they are part of UPDATE or DELETE statements due to its own limitations.

PROBLEM:

Here is the subset of the problem query and as you can see it runs for about 6 minutes in this small subset of data that I used for testing on Mac. All tables are InnoDB based.

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