5 Ways to Better Understand SQL by Adding Optional Parentheses

It appears that our recent beginner SQL articles explaining SQL syntax were quite popular. These include:

• A Beginner’s Guide to the True Order of SQL Operations
• A Probably Incomplete, Comprehensive Guide to the Many Different Ways to JOIN Tables in SQL
• 10 Easy Steps to a Complete Understanding of SQL
• How SQL DISTINCT and ORDER BY are Related
• … and many more

Today, I want to tackle the problem of understanding and learning SQL syntax from a new angle.

SQL’s COBOL-esque syntactic heritage

Unlike most C-style languages, SQL syntax is a messy mixture of keywords, special characters, and both with a lot of overloaded meanings. I’d call myself rather experienced with SQL, yet I’m still often unsure about whether something is a keyword or an identifier (and yes, it does matter):

From my past SQL training sessions, however, I have learned that one of the best tools to understand what’s really going on in SQL syntax is to add parentheses at random places. Parentheses can be noisy, but they can definitely help understand the syntactic structure of a statement.

A trivial example from arithmetics, or logic:

a + b * c
a OR b AND c

In almost all languages, operator precedence dictates that the above be equivalent to this:

a + (b * c)
a OR (b AND c)

And already, we’ve introduced some syntactic clarity to readers who might not be aware of operator precedence. While the parentheses are not necessary in these cases, they can help with readability if the expressions are much more complex than the above.

Did you know you can place parentheses at many other locations in SQL? Here’s a list of interesting places, where most people usually omit parentheses. I’m going to use the Sakila database for examples.

1. Row value expressions

In every day language, we don’t call them “row value expressions”. We call them ordinary “column expressions”. For example, we might look for a specific actor by name

SELECT * 
FROM actor
WHERE first_name = 'SUSAN'
AND last_name = 'DAVIS';

We will get:

|actor_id   |first_name|last_name |
|-----------|----------|----------|
|101        |SUSAN     |DAVIS     |
|110        |SUSAN     |DAVIS     |

But what we really did was this:

-- Works in many dialects
SELECT * 
FROM actor
WHERE (first_name) = ('SUSAN')
AND (last_name) = ('DAVIS');

Or also:

-- Works in a few dialects, including e.g. PostgreSQL
SELECT * 
FROM actor
WHERE ROW (first_name) = ROW ('SUSAN')
AND ROW (last_name) = ROW ('DAVIS');

The parentheses are somewhat ambiguous in this case, the ROW constructor makes it more obvious. The SQL standard specifies a “row value expression special case”, i.e. the case where a row value expression (i.e. a tuple expression) is of degree 1. In case of which most people will “colloquially” omit the parentheses, thinking we’re comparing column expressions.

In this example, we could rewrite the query to this:

SELECT * 
FROM actor
WHERE (first_name, last_name) = ('SUSAN', 'DAVIS');

Or, in funky Oracle, double parentheses are required for no good reason on the right hand side.

SELECT * 
FROM actor
WHERE (first_name, last_name) = (('SUSAN', 'DAVIS'));

But I was not going to confuse you, I was going to clarify things ;-)

In fact, once you get a hang of row value expressions, you will quickly want to use them for less trivial cases than avoiding two AND connected predicates. For example, you can use this approach also with the IN predicate (and if you’re daring enough, with the NOT IN predicate, but beware of NULLS):

SELECT * 
FROM actor
WHERE (first_name, last_name) IN (
  ('SUSAN', 'DAVIS'),
  ('NICK' , 'WAHLBERG')
)

Wow! Result:

|actor_id   |first_name|last_name |
|-----------|----------|----------|
|2          |NICK      |WAHLBERG  |
|101        |SUSAN     |DAVIS     |
|110        |SUSAN     |DAVIS     |

And not only that. You can also use the same approach with IN and subqueries:

-- Actors that have the same name as a customer
SELECT *
FROM actor
WHERE (first_name, last_name) IN (
  SELECT first_name, last_name
  FROM customer
)

And indeed:

|actor_id   |first_name|last_name |
|-----------|----------|----------|
|4          |JENNIFER  |DAVIS     |

Yes! The “colloquial” IN predicate that you all wrote without the parentheses around the row value expression, in reality, had a row value expression of degree 1 on the left side, AND on the right side. Increase that degree to 2, and now you need to write a subquery with 2 columns as well.

It’s quite idiomatic, and readable, and nifty. Quite a few dialects support this.

2. JOINs

Joins are very misunderstood, in SQL. Very very misunderstood. One reason is because people confuse them with other set operations, such as UNION, and thus illustrate them with Venn Diagrams. I’ve already covered that. That article explains that JOINs are just (filtered) cartesian products.

The simplest JOIN type is CROSS JOIN. It does not have an ON or USING clause. Much more common, however, is INNER JOIN, or just JOIN (INNER being an optional keyword).

SELECT a.first_name, a.last_name, f.title
FROM actor AS a
JOIN film_actor AS fa USING (actor_id)
JOIN film AS f USING (film_id)

We’ve all typed millions of these to obtain:

|first_name|last_name |title                         |
|----------|----------|------------------------------|
|...       |...       |...                           |
|PENELOPE  |GUINESS   |SPLASH GUMP                   |
|PENELOPE  |GUINESS   |VERTIGO NORTHWEST             |
|PENELOPE  |GUINESS   |WESTWARD SEABISCUIT           |
|PENELOPE  |GUINESS   |WIZARD COLDBLOODED            |
|NICK      |WAHLBERG  |ADAPTATION HOLES              |
|NICK      |WAHLBERG  |APACHE DIVINE                 |
|NICK      |WAHLBERG  |BABY HALL                     |
|...       |...       |...                           |

But what are these JOIN things? They are not SELECT clauses! They are operators like + or * or AND or OR.

And like any operator, the messy laws of associativity apply (as all the different join types have the same operator precedence, at least in the SQL standard. Some wonky implementations may disagree).

Luckily, left associativity applies with JOIN (right associativity would be madness). So, our magic parentheses come into play again. Our query from before is really this:

SELECT a.first_name, a.last_name, f.title
FROM (
  actor AS a
    JOIN film_actor AS fa 
      USING (actor_id)
)
JOIN film AS f 
  USING (film_id)

Can you see it? The readability problem here is the USING (or ON) clause. Without it, I could have written:

(actor JOIN film_actor) JOIN film

So, join FILM_ACTOR to ACTOR and then join the FILM table to the product.

Because INNER JOIN is associative (both left and right), we could write the following equivalent expression:

actor JOIN (film_actor JOIN film)

So, join FILM to FILM_ACTOR first, and then join the product to ACTOR. Quite a different beast, logically (the optimiser shouldn’t make a difference in this case).

… or in full SQL

SELECT a.first_name, a.last_name, f.title
FROM actor AS a 
  JOIN (
    film_actor
      JOIN film AS f 
        USING (film_id)
  )
USING (actor_id)

Egh. Don’t be clever. Use this only if you really have to. I find it quite unreadable. Careful formatting is essential here. But it works.

With more than 3 tables, you could build entire JOIN trees. While, in order to stay sane, most people will not actually build JOIN trees (yes, a list is also a tree), it is totally possible to do this confusing thing:

SELECT a.first_name, a.last_name, sum(p.amount)
FROM (
  actor AS a
    JOIN film_actor AS fa 
      USING (actor_id)
)
JOIN (
  film AS f
    JOIN (
      inventory AS i 
        JOIN rental AS r
          USING (inventory_id)
    ) USING (film_id)
) USING (film_id)
JOIN payment AS p 
  USING (rental_id)
GROUP BY a.actor_id

Instead of this nice clean SQL:

SELECT a.first_name, a.last_name, sum(p.amount)
FROM actor AS a
JOIN film_actor AS fa USING (actor_id)
JOIN film AS f USING (film_id)
JOIN inventory AS i USING (film_id)
JOIN rental AS r USING (inventory_id)
JOIN payment AS p USING (rental_id)
GROUP BY a.actor_id

… to get the revenue of all films we made for any given actor. Something like this:

|first_name|last_name |sum         |
|----------|----------|------------|
|ADAM      |GRANT     |974.19      |
|ADAM      |HOPPER    |1532.21     |
|AL        |GARLAND   |1525.87     |
|ALAN      |DREYFUSS  |1850.29     |
|ALBERT    |JOHANSSON |2202.78     |
|ALBERT    |NOLTE     |2183.75     |

But nevertheless. It is good to know how JOIN works, syntactically, because there will be that edge case where you want to give precedence to an INNER JOIN and then LEFT JOIN the entire product, or something like that. In that case, parentheses are your friend.

3. DISTINCT

There are no parentheses around the “DISTINCT arguments”. Despite a lot of people thinking there are. This is not what some people think it is:

SELECT DISTINCT (actor_id), first_name, last_name
FROM actor

The parentheses can be omitted, and it is the exact same thing.

The other nice thing about SQL syntax is that you never know whether parentheses are part of the language, or part of an expression. In fact, the above (id) is a row value expression again. If you (accidentally) wrapped more than one column in those parentheses:

SELECT DISTINCT (actor_id, first_name), last_name
FROM actor

Then you’d still get the same behaviour (in PostgreSQL, which supports nesting records like that), but the result is not what you wanted:

|row              |last_name|
|-----------------|---------|
|(1,PENELOPE)     |GUINESS  |
|(2,NICK)         |WAHLBERG |
|(3,ED)           |CHASE    |
|(4,JENNIFER)     |DAVIS    |

Funky eh?

4. UNION, INTERSECT, EXCEPT

The nice thing about SQL is that you can never derive a rule from another rule. While all types of JOIN have the same precedence, the set operators do not. Duh. Luckily, most people don’t use INTERSECT or EXCEPT at all, only UNION [ ALL ], so they don’t run into this problem.

In case there is any doubt, INTERSECT has a higher precedence, whereas UNION and EXCEPT have the same precedence (in the SQL standard). I’ll prove it by quoting it. From ISO/IEC 9075-2:2016(E) 7.17 <query expression> (I’ve removed some irrelevant bits)

<query expression body> ::=
  <query term>
| <query expression body> UNION [ ALL ] <query term>
| <query expression body> EXCEPT [ ALL ] <query term>

<query term> ::=
  <query primary>
| <query term> INTERSECT [ ALL ] <query primary>

See. INTERSECT has a higher precedence. Let’s try it (in PostgreSQL):

SELECT 2 AS a, 3 AS b
UNION
SELECT 1 AS a, 2 AS b
INTERSECT
SELECT 1 AS a, 2 AS b

We get:

|a          |b          |
|-----------|-----------|
|1          |2          |
|2          |3          |

So, what we’ve done effectively (and the parenthesis are totally allowed, because <query term> allows it), is this

SELECT 2 AS a, 3 AS b
UNION
(
  SELECT 1 AS a, 2 AS b
  INTERSECT
  SELECT 1 AS a, 2 AS b
)

Now, for the life of me, I really don’t know how to nicely format parenthesised set operations in SQL. It looks awkward. But here we are. The above is a totally different thing than this:

(
  SELECT 2 AS a, 3 AS b
  UNION
  SELECT 1 AS a, 2 AS b
)
INTERSECT
SELECT 1 AS a, 2 AS b

If we do the union first, and then the intersection, the only resulting record is:

|a          |b          |
|-----------|-----------|
|1          |2          |

A similar effect can be seen when combining UNION and UNION ALL, which have the same precedence and are … left associative. Lucky again. So, this query here:

SELECT 2 AS a, 3 AS b
UNION
SELECT 1 AS a, 2 AS b
UNION ALL
SELECT 1 AS a, 2 AS b

Has a UNION that does not get to remove any duplicates, and then a UNION ALL that adds a duplicate. It is equivalent to this (remember, left associative):

(
  SELECT 2 AS a, 3 AS b
  UNION
  SELECT 1 AS a, 2 AS b
)
UNION ALL
SELECT 1 AS a, 2 AS b

The result is:

|a          |b          |
|-----------|-----------|
|1          |2          |
|2          |3          |
|1          |2          |

It is quite a different beast from this one:

SELECT 2 AS a, 3 AS b
UNION
(
  SELECT 1 AS a, 2 AS b
  UNION ALL
  SELECT 1 AS a, 2 AS b
)

Now, we’ve used parentheses to force the query to do the UNION ALL operator first (producing duplicates), but then, the UNION removes them agian. The result is now:

|a          |b          |
|-----------|-----------|
|1          |2          |
|2          |3          |

Bonus: What about the ORDER BY clause

Ah, yes. The miracles of SQL syntax. In theory (and in the SQL standard), there is an optional ORDER BY clause over all set operations. E.g. like this:

SELECT 2 AS a, 3 AS b
UNION
SELECT 1 AS a, 2 AS b
INTERSECT
SELECT 1 AS a, 2 AS b
ORDER BY a DESC

We’re getting:

|a          |b          |
|-----------|-----------|
|2          |3          |
|1          |2          |

Think of it this way:

(
  SELECT 2 AS a, 3 AS b
  UNION
  SELECT 1 AS a, 2 AS b
  INTERSECT
  SELECT 1 AS a, 2 AS b
)
ORDER BY a DESC

Some dialects may or may not allow you to actually place those parentheses. E.g. PostgreSQL does.

5. Subqueries

When you write subqueries, or specifically:

• Scalar subqueries (subqueries in SELECT or WHERE, etc.)
• Derived tables (subqueries in FROM)

… then you must put them in parentheses. For example, a correlated (scalar) subquery:

SELECT 
  first_name, 
  last_name, (
    -- Correlated subquery here
    SELECT count(*) 
    FROM film_actor AS fa 
    WHERE fa.actor_id = a.actor_id
  ) c
FROM actor AS a

These parentheses are not optional. Neither are those around the derived table:

SELECT 
  first_name, 
  last_name, 
  c
FROM actor AS a
JOIN (
  -- Derived table here
  SELECT actor_id, count(*) AS c
  FROM film_actor
  GROUP BY actor_id
) fa USING (actor_id)

Conclusion

SQL (and its syntax) is a device whose mystery is only exceeded by its power. With parentheses (as with other syntactic tokens), you can never really know if they are part of the language, of some clause, or part of an expression.

With some operators, parentheses help better understand the syntactic structure of the language.

• Row value expressions of degree 1 have optional parentheses. We never write them, but we could have!
• JOINs are really trees, not lists. We can nest them arbitrarily to get associativity under control.
• DISTINCT doesn’t have parentheses. Don’t be fooled by your coworkers’ coding style!
• Set operations have two levels of precedence: 1) INTERSECT and 2) UNION and EXCEPT (assuming standards compliance).
• Subqueries (outside of set operations) have mandatory parentheses

I’m curious about your own greatest SQL syntax confusions. Please leave them in the comments.