Oracle WITH clause

About Oracle WITH clause :
Starting in Oracle9i release 2 we see an incorporation of the SQL-99 “WITH clause”, a tool for materializing subqueries to save Oracle from having to re-compute them multiple times.

The SQL “WITH clause” is very similar to the use of Global temporary tables (GTT), a technique that is often used to improve query speed for complex subqueries. Here are some important notes about the Oracle “WITH clause”:


• The SQL “WITH clause” only works on Oracle 9i release 2 and beyond.
• Formally, the “WITH clause” is called subquery factoring
• The SQL “WITH clause” is used when a subquery is executed multiple times
• Also useful for recursive queries (SQL-99, but not Oracle SQL)

WITH
subquery_name
AS
(the aggregation SQL statement)
SELECT
(query naming subquery_name);



Ex:
WITH

sum_sales AS
( select /*+ materialize */
sum(quantity) all_sales from stores ),
number_stores AS
( select /*+ materialize */
count(*) nbr_stores from stores ),
sales_by_store AS
( select /*+ materialize */
store_name, sum(quantity) store_sales from
store natural join sales )
SELECT
store_name
FROM
store,
sum_sales,
number_stores,
sales_by_store
where
store_sales > (all_sales / nbr_stores);



Note the use of the Oracle undocumented “materialize” hint in the “WITH clause”. The Oracle materialize hint is used to ensure that the Oracle cost-based optimizer materializes the temporary tables that are created inside the “WITH” clause. This is not necessary in Oracle10g, but it helps ensure that the tables are only created one time.

It should be noted that the “WITH clause” does not yet fully-functional within Oracle SQL and it does not yet support the use of “WITH clause” replacement for “CONNECT BY” when performing recursive queries.

The SQL-99 “WITH clause” is very confusing at first because the SQL statement does not begin with the word SELECT. Instead, we use the “WITH clause” to start our SQL query, defining the aggregations, which can then be named in the main query as if they were “real” tables: