PostgreSQL’s New Join Type: LATERAL (2014) | Hacker News Reader

PostgreSQL’s New Join Type: LATERAL (2014)

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I'd normally do what's outlined in this article with CTEs. IE, make a selection, use that as a base in a following selection, repeat, until you have all your data, then join it all together in the needed view at the end.

Is there a performance advantage to using a lateral join over CTEs for this type of analysis?

CTEs can be an optimization barrier. Only recently did that change from "are" to "can be" and even now only in specific situations is it not.

Interesting. I would think conceptually lateral joins would suffer from similar issues, as it would seem like you need to run a query, get a result, and then use it in the next query, and these are all just fancy ways of writing out subqueries/temp tables.

Lateral joins are able to use "downstream" lateral join queries to optimize "upstream" ones?

I think part of it is that LATERAL JOINs were (are, for folks still on <12, which is probably a lot of them) able to be run when needed rather than having to be completely materialized upstream. Now that CTEs don't have to be materialized, this is less interesting.

Beyond that, LATERAL JOINs are really nice way to write out a subquery without a ton of nesting, as shown at https://ddrscott.github.io/blog/2017/what-the-sql-lateral/. (LATERAL can be applied to things in FROM! Especially useful given some set-returning functions can only be used in FROM.)

I think even though you can do most of these things using subqueries or CTEs, LATERAL makes it ergonomic to do them.

I'm hoping someone a little more knowledgable than I replies to this comment with some more details, as I know my knowledge on this particular subject is spotty.

Can you give a situation where CTEs are still a optimization barrier in Postgres?

Pg9.3 is pretty old at this point.

That said laterals can be very useful, and it's still worth reading the article I'd you're not familiar with them.

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