Question

I’m trying to build a PostGIS query that uses an alias of the JOIN statement in the FROM statement, but that is not possible. Is there another way to do it?

SELECT DISTINCT 
ST_Buffer(
    ST_Centroid(geom),
    ST_Area(geom))
FROM building AS b, ST_Transform(sg.geometry, 31467) AS geom 
LEFT JOIN surface_geometry AS sg ON b.id = sg.cityobject_id WHERE ST_Area(geom) < 100

Answer 1

You can introduce an extra level of subquery.

So currently you have:

SELECT DISTINCT ST_Buffer( ST_Centroid(geom), ST_Area(geom) )
FROM building AS b,
     ST_Transform(sg.geometry, 31467) AS geom 
     LEFT JOIN surface_geometry AS sg ON b.id = sg.cityobject_id
WHERE ST_Area(geom) < 100

(I changed the indentation to make a bit more sense of it, although I still don’t understand it: you don’t seem to use the values from b anywhere). You need something like:

SELECT DISTINCT ST_Buffer( ST_Centroid(geom), ST_Area(geom) )
FROM (
    SELECT ST_Transform(sg.geometry, 31467) AS geom 
    FROM building AS b
         LEFT JOIN surface_geometry AS sg ON b.id = sg.cityobject_id
) x
WHERE ST_Area(geom) < 100