Everything is a Table

This is the most trivial of tricks, and not even really a trick, but it is fundamental to a thorough understanding of SQL: Everything is a table! When you see a SQL statement like this:

SELECT *
FROM person

… you will quickly spot the table person sitting right there in the FROM clause. That’s cool, that is a table. But did you realise that the whole statement is also a table? For instance, you can write:

SELECT *
FROM (
  SELECT *
  FROM person
) t

And now, you have created what is called a “derived table” – i.e. a nested SELECT statement in a FROM clause.

That’s trivial, but if you think of it, quite elegant. You can also create ad-hoc, in-memory tables with the VALUES() constructor as such, in some databases (e.g. PostgreSQL, SQL Server):

SELECT *
FROM (
  VALUES(1),(2),(3)
) t(a)

Which simply yields:

 a
---
 1
 2
 3

If that clause is not supported, you can revert to derived tables, e.g. in Oracle:

SELECT *
FROM (
  SELECT 1 AS a FROM DUAL UNION ALL
  SELECT 2 AS a FROM DUAL UNION ALL
  SELECT 3 AS a FROM DUAL
) t

Now that you’re seeing that VALUES() and derived tables are really the same thing, conceptually, let’s review the INSERT statement, which comes in two flavours:

-- SQL Server, PostgreSQL, some others:
INSERT INTO my_table(a)
VALUES(1),(2),(3);

-- Oracle, many others:
INSERT INTO my_table(a)
SELECT 1 AS a FROM DUAL UNION ALL
SELECT 2 AS a FROM DUAL UNION ALL
SELECT 3 AS a FROM DUAL

In SQL everything is a table. When you’re inserting rows into a table, you’re not really inserting individual rows. You’re really inserting entire tables. Most people just happen to insert a single-row-table most of the time, and thus don’t realise what INSERT really does.

Everything is a table. In PostgreSQL, even functions are tables:

SELECT *
FROM substring('abcde', 2, 3)

The above yields:

substring
---------
bcd

If you’re programming in Java, you can use the analogy of the Java 8 Stream API to take this one step further. Consider the following equivalent concepts:

TABLE          : Stream<Tuple<..>>
SELECT         : map() 
DISTINCT       : distinct()
JOIN           : flatMap()
WHERE / HAVING : filter()
GROUP BY       : collect()
ORDER BY       : sorted()
UNION ALL      : concat()

With Java 8, “everything is a Stream” (as soon as you start working with Streams, at least). No matter how you transform a stream, e.g. with map() or filter(), the resulting type is always a Stream again.

We’ve written an entire article to explain this more deeply, and to compare the Stream API with SQL:
Common SQL Clauses and Their Equivalents in Java 8 Streams

And if you’re looking for “better streams” (i.e. streams with even more SQL semantics), do check out jOOλ, an open source library that brings SQL window functions to Java.