Joining multiple tables as snowball rolling

Discipline

Databases

Form

Database Analogies

Attribution — Origin / Source

Collected by Xiaoying Tu — Textbook Beaulieu, A. (2009). Learning SQL. 2 ed. O'Reilly.

Topic

Data storage and indexing

Domain

Within-Database

Conceptual Advantage

Helps readers understand the mechanism of joining more than two tables

Mapping

SymbolConcept
snowball the "intermediate table" after joining each additional table

Draws Attention To

The fact that each additional table is joined with the intermediate resulting table, just like the snowball gets bigger when rolling down the hill.

Details

Text

One way to think of a query that uses three or more tables is as a snowball rolling down a hill. The first two tables get the ball rolling, and each subsequent table gets tacked on to the snowball as it heads downhill. You can think of the snowball as the intermediate result set, which is picking up more and more columns as subsequent tables are joined.

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