Selection Queries

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CockroachDB v19.1 is no longer supported. For more details, see the Release Support Policy.

Selection queries read and process data in CockroachDB. They are more general than simple SELECT clauses: they can group one or more selection clauses with set operations and can request a specific ordering or row limit.

Selection queries can occur:

At the top level of a query like other SQL statements.
Between parentheses as a subquery.
As operand to other statements that take tabular data as input, for example INSERT, UPSERT, CREATE TABLE AS or ALTER ... SPLIT AT.

Synopsis

Parameters

Parameter	Description
`common_table_expr`	See Common Table Expressions.
`select_clause`	A valid selection clause, either simple or using set operations.
`sort_clause`	An optional `ORDER BY` clause. See Ordering Query Results for details.
`limit_clause`	An optional `LIMIT` clause. See Limiting Query Results for details.
`offset_clause`	An optional `OFFSET` clause. See Limiting Query Results for details.

The optional LIMIT and OFFSET clauses can appear in any order, but must appear after ORDER BY, if also present.

Note:

Because the WITH, ORDER BY, LIMIT and OFFSET sub-clauses are all optional, any simple selection clause is also a valid selection query.

Selection clauses

Selection clauses are the main component of a selection query. They define tabular data. There are four specific syntax forms collectively named selection clauses:

Form	Usage
`SELECT`	Load or compute tabular data from various sources. This is the most common selection clause.
`VALUES`	List tabular data by the client.
`TABLE`	Load tabular data from the database.
Set Operations	Combine tabular data from two or more selection clauses.

Note:

To perform joins or other relational operations over selection clauses, use a table expression and convert it back into a selection clause with TABLE or SELECT.

Synopsis

`VALUES` clause

Syntax

A VALUES clause defines tabular data defined by the expressions listed within parentheses. Each parenthesis group defines a single row in the resulting table.

The columns of the resulting table data have automatically generated names. These names can be modified with AS when the VALUES clause is used as a sub-query.

Example

> VALUES (1, 2, 3), (4, 5, 6);

+---------+---------+---------+
| column1 | column2 | column3 |
+---------+---------+---------+
|       1 |       2 |       3 |
|       4 |       5 |       6 |
+---------+---------+---------+

`TABLE` clause

Syntax

A TABLE clause reads tabular data from a specified table. The columns of the resulting table data are named after the schema of the table.

In general, TABLE x is equivalent to SELECT * FROM x, but it is shorter to type.

Note:

Any table expression between parentheses is a valid operand for TABLE, not just simple table or view names.

Example

> CREATE TABLE employee_copy AS TABLE employee;

This statement copies the content from table employee into a new table. However, note that the TABLE clause does not preserve the indexing, foreign key, or constraint and default information from the schema of the table it reads from, so in this example, the new table employee_copy will likely have a simpler schema than employee.

Other examples:

> TABLE employee;

> INSERT INTO employee_copy TABLE employee;

`SELECT` clause

See Simple SELECT Clause for more details.

Set operations

Set operations combine data from two selection clauses. They are valid as operand to other set operations or as main component in a selection query.

Synopsis

Set operators

SQL lets you compare the results of multiple selection clauses. You can think of each of the set operators as representing a Boolean operator:

UNION = OR
INTERSECT = AND
EXCEPT = NOT

By default, each of these comparisons displays only one copy of each value (similar to SELECT DISTINCT). However, each function also lets you add an ALL to the clause to display duplicate values.

Union: Combine two queries

UNION combines the results of two queries into one result.

> SELECT name
FROM accounts
WHERE state_opened IN ('AZ', 'NY')
UNION
SELECT name
FROM mortgages
WHERE state_opened IN ('AZ', 'NY');

+-----------------+
|      name       |
+-----------------+
| Naseem Joossens |
| Ricarda Caron   |
| Carola Dahl     |
| Aygün Sanna     |
+-----------------+

To show duplicate rows, you can use ALL.

> SELECT name
FROM accounts
WHERE state_opened IN ('AZ', 'NY')
UNION ALL
SELECT name
FROM mortgages
WHERE state_opened IN ('AZ', 'NY');

+-----------------+
|      name       |
+-----------------+
| Naseem Joossens |
| Ricarda Caron   |
| Carola Dahl     |
| Naseem Joossens |
| Aygün Sanna     |
| Carola Dahl     |
+-----------------+

Intersect: Retrieve intersection of two queries

INTERSECT finds only values that are present in both query operands.

> SELECT name
FROM accounts
WHERE state_opened IN ('NJ', 'VA')
INTERSECT
SELECT name
FROM mortgages;

+-----------------+
|      name       |
+-----------------+
| Danijel Whinery |
| Agar Archer     |
+-----------------+

Except: Exclude one query's results from another

EXCEPT finds values that are present in the first query operand but not the second.

> SELECT name
FROM mortgages
EXCEPT
SELECT name
FROM accounts;

+------------------+
|       name       |
+------------------+
| Günay García     |
| Karla Goddard    |
| Cybele Seaver    |
+------------------+

Ordering results

The following sections provide examples. For more details, see Ordering Query Results.

Order retrieved rows by one column

> SELECT *
FROM accounts
WHERE balance BETWEEN 350 AND 500
ORDER BY balance DESC;

+----+--------------------+---------+----------+--------------+
| id |        name        | balance |   type   | state_opened |
+----+--------------------+---------+----------+--------------+
| 12 | Raniya Žitnik      |     500 | savings  | CT           |
| 59 | Annibale Karga     |     500 | savings  | ND           |
| 27 | Adelbert Ventura   |     500 | checking | IA           |
| 86 | Theresa Slaski     |     500 | checking | WY           |
| 73 | Ruadh Draganov     |     500 | checking | TN           |
| 16 | Virginia Ruan      |     400 | checking | HI           |
| 43 | Tahirih Malinowski |     400 | checking | MS           |
| 50 | Dusan Mallory      |     350 | savings  | NV           |
+----+--------------------+---------+----------+--------------+

Order retrieved rows by multiple columns

Columns are sorted in the order you list them in sortby_list. For example, ORDER BY a, b sorts the rows by column a and then sorts rows with the same a value by their column b values.

> SELECT *
FROM accounts
WHERE balance BETWEEN 350 AND 500
ORDER BY balance DESC, name ASC;

+----+--------------------+---------+----------+--------------+
| id |        name        | balance |   type   | state_opened |
+----+--------------------+---------+----------+--------------+
| 27 | Adelbert Ventura   |     500 | checking | IA           |
| 59 | Annibale Karga     |     500 | savings  | ND           |
| 12 | Raniya Žitnik      |     500 | savings  | CT           |
| 73 | Ruadh Draganov     |     500 | checking | TN           |
| 86 | Theresa Slaski     |     500 | checking | WY           |
| 43 | Tahirih Malinowski |     400 | checking | MS           |
| 16 | Virginia Ruan      |     400 | checking | HI           |
| 50 | Dusan Mallory      |     350 | savings  | NV           |
+----+--------------------+---------+----------+--------------+

Limiting row count and pagination

The following sections provide examples. For more details, see Limiting Query Results.

Limit number of retrieved results

You can reduce the number of results with LIMIT.

> SELECT id, name
FROM accounts
LIMIT 5;

+----+------------------+
| id |       name       |
+----+------------------+
|  1 | Bjorn Fairclough |
|  2 | Bjorn Fairclough |
|  3 | Arturo Nevin     |
|  4 | Arturo Nevin     |
|  5 | Naseem Joossens  |
+----+------------------+

Paginate through limited results

To iterate through a table one "page" of results at a time (also known as pagination) there are two options, only one of which is recommended:

Keyset pagination (fast, recommended)
LIMIT / OFFSET pagination (slow, not recommended)

Keyset pagination (also known as the "seek method") is used to fetch a subset of records from a table quickly. It does this by restricting the set of records returned with a combination of WHERE and LIMIT clauses. To get the next page, you check the value of the column in the WHERE clause against the last row returned in the previous page of results.

The general pattern for keyset pagination queries is:

SELECT * FROM t
  WHERE key > ${value}
  ORDER BY key
  LIMIT ${amount}

This is faster than using LIMIT/OFFSET because, instead of doing a full table scan up to the value of the OFFSET, a keyset pagination query looks at a fixed-size set of records for each iteration. This can be done quickly provided that the key used in the WHERE clause to implement the pagination is indexed and unique. A primary key meets both of these criteria.

Pagination example

The examples in this section use the employees data set, which you can load into CockroachDB as follows:

CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS employees;
USE employees;
IMPORT PGDUMP 'https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/cockroachdb-movr/datasets/employees-db/pg_dump/employees-full.sql.gz';

To get the first page of results using keyset pagination, run:

SELECT * FROM employees WHERE emp_no > 10000 LIMIT 25;

  emp_no |        birth_date         | first_name |  last_name  | gender |         hire_date          
+--------+---------------------------+------------+-------------+--------+---------------------------+
   10001 | 1953-09-02 00:00:00+00:00 | Georgi     | Facello     | M      | 1986-06-26 00:00:00+00:00  
   10002 | 1964-06-02 00:00:00+00:00 | Bezalel    | Simmel      | F      | 1985-11-21 00:00:00+00:00  
   10003 | 1959-12-03 00:00:00+00:00 | Parto      | Bamford     | M      | 1986-08-28 00:00:00+00:00  
   ... snip

(25 rows)

Time: 1.31ms

Tip:

If you do not know what the minimum value of the key is, either SELECT min(key) FROM table or use a known minimum value for the key's data type.

To get the second page of results, run:

SELECT * FROM employees WHERE emp_no > 10025 LIMIT 25;

  emp_no |        birth_date         | first_name | last_name  | gender |         hire_date          
+--------+---------------------------+------------+------------+--------+---------------------------+
   10026 | 1953-04-03 00:00:00+00:00 | Yongqiao   | Berztiss   | M      | 1995-03-20 00:00:00+00:00  
   10027 | 1962-07-10 00:00:00+00:00 | Divier     | Reistad    | F      | 1989-07-07 00:00:00+00:00  
   10028 | 1963-11-26 00:00:00+00:00 | Domenick   | Tempesti   | M      | 1991-10-22 00:00:00+00:00  
   ... snip!

(25 rows)

Time: 1.473ms

To get an arbitrary page of results showing employees whose IDs (emp_no) are in a much higher range, try the following query. Note that it takes about the same amount of time to run as the previous queries.

SELECT * FROM employees WHERE emp_no > 300025 LIMIT 25;

  emp_no |        birth_date         | first_name |  last_name   | gender |         hire_date          
+--------+---------------------------+------------+--------------+--------+---------------------------+
  400000 | 1963-11-29 00:00:00+00:00 | Mitsuyuki  | Reinhart     | M      | 1985-08-27 00:00:00+00:00  
  400001 | 1962-06-02 00:00:00+00:00 | Rosalie    | Chinin       | M      | 1986-11-28 00:00:00+00:00  
  400002 | 1964-08-16 00:00:00+00:00 | Quingbo    | Birnbaum     | F      | 1986-04-23 00:00:00+00:00  
  ... snip!

(25 rows)

Time: 1.319ms

Compare the execution speed of the previous keyset pagination queries with the query below that uses LIMIT / OFFSET to get the same page of results:

SELECT * FROM employees LIMIT 25 OFFSET 200024;

  emp_no |        birth_date         | first_name |  last_name   | gender |         hire_date          
+--------+---------------------------+------------+--------------+--------+---------------------------+
  400000 | 1963-11-29 00:00:00+00:00 | Mitsuyuki  | Reinhart     | M      | 1985-08-27 00:00:00+00:00  
  400001 | 1962-06-02 00:00:00+00:00 | Rosalie    | Chinin       | M      | 1986-11-28 00:00:00+00:00  
  400002 | 1964-08-16 00:00:00+00:00 | Quingbo    | Birnbaum     | F      | 1986-04-23 00:00:00+00:00  
  ... snip!

(25 rows)

Time: 118.114ms

The query using LIMIT/OFFSET for pagination is almost 100 times slower. To see why, let's use EXPLAIN.

EXPLAIN SELECT * FROM employees LIMIT 25 OFFSET 200024;

    tree    |    field    |    description
+-----------+-------------+-------------------+
            | distributed | true
            | vectorized  | true
  limit     |             |
   │        | offset      | 200024
   └── scan |             |
            | table       | employees@primary
            | spans       | ALL
            | limit       | 200049

The culprit is this: because we used LIMIT/OFFSET, we are performing a full table scan (see spans = ALL above) from the first record all the way up to the value of the offset. In other words, we are iterating over a big array of rows from 1 to n, where n is 200049.

Meanwhile, the keyset pagination queries are looking at a much smaller range of table spans, which is much faster (see spans = 300026- + 25 below). Because there is an index on every column in the WHERE clause, these queries are doing an index lookup to jump to the start of the page of results, and then getting an additional 25 rows from there. This is much faster.

EXPLAIN SELECT * FROM employees WHERE emp_no > 300025 LIMIT 25;

  tree |    field    |    description
+------+-------------+-------------------+
       | distributed | false
       | vectorized  | false
  scan |             |
       | table       | employees@primary
       | spans       | /300026-
       | limit       | 25

Warning:

Using a sequential (i.e., non-UUID) primary key creates hot spots in the database for write-heavy workloads, since concurrent INSERTs to the table will attempt to write to the same (or nearby) underlying ranges. This can be mitigated by designing your schema with multi-column primary keys which include a monotonically increasing column.

Note:

CockroachDB does not implement cursors. For a scale-out system like CockroachDB, using a cursor would not be recommended for the same reason that paginating with LIMIT/OFFSET is not recommended: it forces the server to keep track of state, which means the pagination queries do not scale well.

Composability

Selection clauses are defined in the context of selection queries. Table expressions are defined in the context of the FROM sub-clause of SELECT. Nevertheless, they can be integrated with one another to form more complex queries or statements.

Using any selection clause as a selection query

Any selection clause can be used as a selection query with no change.

For example, the construct SELECT * FROM accounts is a selection clause. It is also a valid selection query, and thus can be used as a stand-alone statement by appending a semicolon:

> SELECT * FROM accounts;

+----+-----------------------+---------+----------+--------------+
| id |         name          | balance |   type   | state_opened |
+----+-----------------------+---------+----------+--------------+
|  1 | Bjorn Fairclough      |    1200 | checking | AL           |
|  2 | Bjorn Fairclough      |    2500 | savings  | AL           |
|  3 | Arturo Nevin          |     250 | checking | AK           |
[ truncated ]
+----+-----------------------+---------+----------+--------------+

Likewise, the construct VALUES (1), (2), (3) is also a selection clause and thus can also be used as a selection query on its own:

> VALUES (1), (2), (3);

+---------+
| column1 |
+---------+
|       1 |
|       2 |
|       3 |
+---------+
(3 rows)

Using any table expression as selection clause

Any table expression can be used as a selection clause (and thus also a selection query) by prefixing it with TABLE or by using it as an operand to SELECT * FROM.

For example, the simple table name customers is a table expression, which designates all rows in that table. The expressions TABLE accounts and SELECT * FROM accounts are valid selection clauses.

Likewise, the SQL join expression customers c JOIN orders o ON c.id = o.customer_id is a table expression. You can turn it into a valid selection clause, and thus a valid selection query as follows:

> TABLE (customers c JOIN orders o ON c.id = o.customer_id);

> SELECT * FROM customers c JOIN orders o ON c.id = o.customer_id;

Using any selection query as table expression

Any selection query (or selection clause) can be used as a table expression by enclosing it between parentheses, which forms a subquery.

For example, the following construct is a selection query, but is not a valid table expression:

> SELECT * FROM customers ORDER BY name LIMIT 5

To make it valid as operand to FROM or another table expression, you can enclose it between parentheses as follows:

> SELECT id FROM (SELECT * FROM customers ORDER BY name LIMIT 5);

> SELECT o.id
    FROM orders o
    JOIN (SELECT * FROM customers ORDER BY name LIMIT 5) AS c
      ON o.customer_id = c.id;

Using selection queries with other statements

Selection queries are also valid as operand in contexts that require tabular data.

For example:

Statement	Example using `SELECT`	Example using `VALUES`	Example using `TABLE`
`INSERT`	`INSERT INTO foo SELECT * FROM bar`	`INSERT INTO foo VALUES (1), (2), (3)`	`INSERT INTO foo TABLE bar`
`UPSERT`	`UPSERT INTO foo SELECT * FROM bar`	`UPSERT INTO foo VALUES (1), (2), (3)`	`UPSERT INTO foo TABLE bar`
`CREATE TABLE AS`	`CREATE TABLE foo AS SELECT * FROM bar` `CREATE TABLE foo AS VALUES (1),(2),(3)`	`CREATE TABLE foo AS TABLE bar`
`ALTER ... SPLIT AT`	`ALTER TABLE foo SPLIT AT SELECT * FROM bar` `ALTER TABLE foo SPLIT AT VALUES (1),(2),(3)`	`ALTER TABLE foo SPLIT AT TABLE bar`
Subquery in a table expression	`SELECT * FROM (SELECT * FROM bar)`	`SELECT * FROM (VALUES (1),(2),(3))`	`SELECT * FROM (TABLE bar)`
Subquery in a scalar expression	`SELECT * FROM foo WHERE x IN (SELECT * FROM bar)`	`SELECT * FROM foo WHERE x IN (VALUES (1),(2),(3))`	`SELECT * FROM foo WHERE x IN (TABLE bar)`

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Selection Queries

Synopsis

Parameters

Selection clauses

Synopsis

`VALUES` clause

Syntax

Example

`TABLE` clause

Syntax

Example

`SELECT` clause

Set operations

Synopsis

Set operators

Union: Combine two queries

Intersect: Retrieve intersection of two queries

Except: Exclude one query's results from another

Ordering results

Order retrieved rows by one column

Order retrieved rows by multiple columns

Limit number of retrieved results

Paginate through limited results

Composability

Using any selection clause as a selection query

Using any table expression as selection clause

Using any selection query as table expression

Using selection queries with other statements

See also

Cockroach University

Docs Hub

Cockroach University

Docs Hub

Selection Queries

Synopsis

Parameters

Selection clauses

Synopsis

VALUES clause

Syntax

Example

TABLE clause

Syntax

Example

SELECT clause

Set operations

Synopsis

Set operators

Union: Combine two queries

Intersect: Retrieve intersection of two queries

Except: Exclude one query's results from another

Ordering results

Order retrieved rows by one column

Order retrieved rows by multiple columns

Limiting row count and pagination

Limit number of retrieved results

Paginate through limited results

Pagination example

Composability

Using any selection clause as a selection query

Using any table expression as selection clause

Using any selection query as table expression

Using selection queries with other statements

See also

Cockroach
University

Cockroach
University

`VALUES` clause

`TABLE` clause

`SELECT` clause