Db2 Subquery

Summary: in this tutorial, you will learn about the Db2 subquery or subselect which is a SELECT statement nested inside another statement such as SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE.

Introduction to Db2 subquery

A subquery is a nested SQL statement that contains a SELECT statement inside the WHERE or HAVING clause of another SQL statement. A subquery is called a subselect.

The subquery allows you to form a search condition based on the data in another table. For example, you can find all books by publishers whose name contains the keyword Oxford:

SELECT 
	title, rating, publisher_id 
FROM 
	books
WHERE 
	publisher_id IN (
		SELECT 
			publisher_id 
		FROM 
			publishers
		WHERE 
			name LIKE '%Oxford%'
);
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

In this example, here is the subquery:

SELECT 
	publisher_id 
FROM 
	publishers
WHERE 
	name LIKE '%Oxford%';
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

The subquery is always enclosed in parentheses.

A subquery is also known as an inner query or inner select while the query that contains the subquery is known as an outer query or outer select.

To better understand the result of the outer query, you can imagine that Db2 goes through the following process:

1) DB2 first executes the subquery to get a list of publisher id:

SELECT
   publisher_id
FROM
   publishers
WHERE
   name LIKE '%Oxford%';
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

Here is the output:

PUBLISHER_ID
-------------
148
149
150
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

2) DB2 then uses this list for the search condition of the outer query:

SELECT 
	title, 
	rating, 
	publisher_id 
FROM 
	books
WHERE 
	publisher_id IN (148,149,150);
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

By using the subquery, you are able to combine steps together. The subquery removes the step of selecting the publisher id list and plugging them into the outer select. On top of it, the result of the query is automatically adjusted whenever the publisher data changes.

Nested Subqueries

Db2 allows you to nest a subquery within another subquery. The relationship between the nested subquery and subquery is the same as the relationship between the subquery and outer query. The maximum level of nesting in Db2 is 15.

Db2 Subquery types

Db2 allows you to use a subquery in the following:

• in the place of expression in the SELECT clause
• in the FROM clause
• within the IN or NOT IN operator in the WHERE clause.
• within the ANY or ALL operator in the WHERE clause
• within the EXISTS or NOT EXISTS operator in the WHERE clause.

1) Using a subquery in place of an expression example

When a subquery returns a single value, you can place it in place of an expression e.g., in the select list of the SELECT clause.

This example uses a subquery to find the average number of pages of all books in the books table:

SELECT 
	title, 
	total_pages, 
	(SELECT 
		ROUND(AVG(total_pages),0) 
	FROM 
		books
	) avg_pages
FROM 
	books
ORDER BY 
	title;
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

2) Using a subquery with IN operator example

You often use a subquery with the IN operator. In this case, the subquery returns zero or multiple values. The outer query makes use of these values as a filter.

The following statement returns all books from the authors whose first name is Tim.

SELECT 
	title
FROM 
	books b
INNER JOIN book_authors A 
	ON A.book_id = b.book_id
WHERE author_id IN (
	SELECT 
		author_id 
	FROM 
		authors 
	WHERE 
		first_name = 'Tim'
);
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

In this example, the subquery returns a list of author ids which are used in the outer query to find their books.

3) Using subquery with ANY operator example

The following illustrates the syntax of a subquery used with the ANY operator:

expression comparison_operator ANY (subquery)
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

Suppose, the subquery returns a list of value v1, v2, …. The ANY operator returns true if one of the following comparison pair evaluates to true:

(expression, v1)
(expression, v2)
(expression, ...)
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

Note that the comparison operators are =, >, >=, <, <=, and <>.

The following statement uses a query in the ANY operator to find books which have more than five authors.

SELECT 
	book_id, 
	title, 
	rating
FROM
	books 
WHERE
	book_id = ANY(
		SELECT 
			book_id
		FROM 
			book_authors
		GROUP BY 
			book_id
		HAVING 
			COUNT(author_id) > 5
	);
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

4) Using a subquery with ALL operator example

The syntax of using a subquery with the ALL operator is similar to the syntax of using the subquery with the ANY operator:

expression comparison_operator ALL (subquery)
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

The ALL operator returns true if all comparison pairs return to TRUE.

This statement uses the ALL operator to find the books whose ratings are greater than the average rating of all books by publishers:

SELECT 
	title, 
	rating
FROM 
	books 
WHERE 
	rating > ALL(
		SELECT 
			AVG(rating)
		FROM 
			books
		GROUP BY publisher_id
);
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

5) Using a subquery with EXISTS operator example

Here is the syntax of using a subquery with EXISTS and NOT EXISTS operator:

WHERE [NOT] EXISTS (subquery)
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

The EXISTS operator returns true only if the subquery returns a non-empty result set. The NOT operator negates the EXISTS operator.

The following query finds the authors who have books published in 2019:

SELECT 
	first_name,
	last_name
FROM 
	authors a
	INNER JOIN book_authors b 
		ON b.author_id = a.author_id
WHERE 
	EXISTS (
		SELECT 
			book_id
		FROM 
			books
		WHERE 
			YEAR(published_date) = 2018 AND 
        	book_id = b.book_id
);
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

In this tutorial, you have learned about the Db2 subquery and how to use various types of subqueries to query data.