What is the correct result for this query?

Question

I came across this puzzle in the comments here

CREATE TABLE r (b INT);

SELECT 1 FROM r HAVING 1=1;

SQL Server and PostgreSQL return 1 row.

MySQL and Oracle return zero rows.

Which is correct? Or are both equally valid?

Answer 1

Per the standard:

SELECT 1 FROM r HAVING 1=1

means

SELECT 1 FROM r GROUP BY () HAVING 1=1

Citation ISO/IEC 9075-2:2011 7.10 Syntax Rule 1 (Part of the definition of the HAVING clause):

Let HC be the <having clause>. Let TE be the <table expression> that immediately contains HC. If TE does not immediately contain a <group by clause>, then “GROUP BY ()” is implicit. Let T be the descriptor of the table defined by the <group by clause> GBC immediately contained in TE and let R be the result of GBC.

Ok so that much is pretty clear.

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Assertion: 1=1 is true search condition. I will provide no citation for this.

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Now

SELECT 1 FROM r GROUP BY () HAVING 1=1

is equivlent to

SELECT 1 FROM r GROUP BY ()

Citation ISO/IEC 9075-2:2011 7.10 General Rule 1:

The <search condition> is evaluated for each group of R. The result of the <having clause> is a grouped table of those groups of R for which the result of the <search condition> is True.

Logic: Since the search condition is always true, the result is R, which is the result of the group by expression.

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The following is an excerpt from the General Rules of 7.9 (the definition of the GROUP BY CLAUSE)

1) If no <where clause> is specified, then let T be the result of the preceding <from clause>; otherwise, let T be the result of the preceding <where clause>.

2) Case:

a) If there are no grouping columns, then the result of the <group by clause> is the grouped table consisting of T as its only group.

Thus we can conclude that

FROM r GROUP BY ()

results in a grouped table, consisting of one group, with zero rows (since R is empty).

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An excerpt from the General Rules of 7.12, which defines a Query Specification (a.k.a a SELECT statement):

1) Case:

a) If T is not a grouped table, then [...]

b) If T is a grouped table, then

Case:

i) If T has 0 (zero) groups, then let TEMP be an empty table.

ii) If T has one or more groups, then each <value expression> is applied to each group of T yielding a table TEMP of M rows, where M is the number of groups in T. The i-th column of TEMP contains the values derived by the evaluation of the i-th <value expression>. [...]

2) Case:

a) If the <set quantifier> DISTINCT is not specified, then the result of the <query specification> is TEMP.

Therefore since the table has one group, it must have one result row.

Thus

SELECT 1 FROM r HAVING 1=1

should return a 1 row result set.

Q.E.D.

Answer 2

When there is a HAVING clause, without a WHERE clause:

SELECT 1 FROM r HAVING 1=1;

... then GROUP BY () is implicit. So, the query should be equivalent to:

SELECT 1 FROM r GROUP BY () HAVING 1=1;

... which should group all rows of the table into one group (even if the table has no rows at all - it's still one group of 0 rows) and return 1 row. The HAVING with the True condition should have no effect at all after that.

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From a different angle, how many rows should a query like this return?

SELECT COUNT(*), MAX(b) FROM r;

One, zero or "zero or one, depending on if the table is empty or not"?

I think one row, no matter how many rows r has.

Answer 3

From what I see, it looks like SQLServer and PostgerSQL don't bother looking into table at all:

CREATE TABLE r (b INT);
insert into r(b) values (1);
insert into r(b) values (2);
SELECT 1 FROM r HAVING 1=1;

also returns just one row. Even though SQLServer docs says

When GROUP BY is not used, HAVING behaves like a WHERE clause.

that is not true in this case - WHERE 1=1 instead of HAVING returns proper number of rows. I'd say it's optimizer bug (or at least documentation bug)... SQLServer plan shows 'Constant scan' in case of HAVING and 'table scan' for WHERE...

Oracle and Mysql behaviour seems more logical and correct to me...