Question

I would like to do something like

(SELECT ... FROM ...) AS my_select
WHERE id IN (SELECT MAX(id) FROM my_select GROUP BY name)

Is it possible to somehow do the “AS my_select” part (i.e. assign an alias to a SELECT statement)?

(Note: This is a theoretical question. I realize that I can do it without assign an alias to a SELECT statement, but I would like to know whether I can do it with that.)

Answer 1

Not sure exactly what you try to denote with that syntax, but in almost all RDBMS-es you can use a subquery in the FROM clause (sometimes called an “inline-view”):

SELECT..
FROM (
     SELECT ...
     FROM ...
     ) my_select
WHERE ...

In advanced “enterprise” RDBMS-es (like oracle, SQL Server, postgresql) you can use common table expressions which allows you to refer to a query by name and reuse it even multiple times:

-- Define the CTE expression name and column list.
WITH Sales_CTE (SalesPersonID, SalesOrderID, SalesYear)
AS
-- Define the CTE query.
(
    SELECT SalesPersonID, SalesOrderID, YEAR(OrderDate) AS SalesYear
    FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader
    WHERE SalesPersonID IS NOT NULL
)
-- Define the outer query referencing the CTE name.
SELECT SalesPersonID, COUNT(SalesOrderID) AS TotalSales, SalesYear
FROM Sales_CTE
GROUP BY SalesYear, SalesPersonID
ORDER BY SalesPersonID, SalesYear;

(example from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms190766(v=sql.105).aspx)