I can't to understand Firebird group logic
Query:
SELECT t.id FROM T1 t
INNER JOIN T2 j ON j.id = t.jid
WHERE t.id = 1
GROUP BY t.id
works perfectly
But when I try to get other fields:
SELECT * FROM T1 t
INNER JOIN T2 j ON j.id = t.jid
WHERE t.id = 1
GROUP BY t.id
I get error:
Invalid expression in the select list (not contained in either an aggregate function or the GROUP BY clause)
When you use GROUP BY
in your query, the field or fields specified are used as 'keys', and data rows are grouped based on unique combinations of those 2 fields. In the result set, every such unique combination has one and only one row.
In your case, the only identifier in the group is t.id
. Now consider that you have 2 records in the table, both with t.id = 1
, but having different values for another column, say, t.name
. If you try to select both id
and name
columns, it directly contradicts the constraint that one group can have only one row. That is why you cannot select any field apart from the group key.
For aggregate functions it is different. That is because, when you sum or count values or get the maximum, you are basically performing that operation only based on the id
field, effectively ignoring the data in the other columns. So, there is no issue because there can only be one answer to, say, count of all names with a particular id.
In conclusion, if you want to show a column in the results, you need to group by it. This will however, make the grouping more granular, which may not be desirable. In that case, you can do something like this:
select * from T1 t
where t.id in
(SELECT t.id FROM T1 t
INNER JOIN T2 j ON j.id = t.jid
WHERE t.id = 1
GROUP BY t.id)