Relational Data - Statements - Select - Union
You can use UNION
with explicitly specifying UNION ALL
or UNION DISTINCT
.
If you don’t specify ALL
or DISTINCT
, it will depend on the union_default_mode
setting. The difference between UNION ALL
and UNION DISTINCT
is that UNION DISTINCT
will do a distinct transform for union result, it is equivalent to SELECT DISTINCT
from a subquery containing UNION ALL
.
You can use UNION
to combine any number of SELECT
queries by extending their results. Example:
SELECT CounterID, 1 AS table, toInt64(count()) AS c
FROM test.hits
GROUP BY CounterID
UNION ALL
SELECT CounterID, 2 AS table, sum(Sign) AS c
FROM test.visits
GROUP BY CounterID
HAVING c > 0
Result columns are matched by their index (order inside SELECT
). If column names do not match, names for the final result are taken from the first query.
Type casting is performed for unions. For example, if two queries being combined have the same field with non-Nullable
and Nullable
types from a compatible type, the resulting UNION
has a Nullable
type field.
Queries that are parts of UNION
can be enclosed in round brackets. ORDER BY and LIMIT are applied to separate queries, not to the final result. If you need to apply a conversion to the final result, you can put all the queries with UNION
in a subquery in the FROM clause.
If you use UNION
without explicitly specifying UNION ALL
or UNION DISTINCT
, you can specify the union mode using the union_default_mode setting. The setting values can be ALL
, DISTINCT
or an empty string. However, if you use UNION
with union_default_mode
setting to empty string, it will throw an exception. The following examples demonstrate the results of queries with different values setting.
Query:
SET union_default_mode = 'DISTINCT';
SELECT 1 UNION SELECT 2 UNION SELECT 3 UNION SELECT 2;
Result:
┌─1─┐
│ 1 │
└───┘
┌─1─┐
│ 2 │
└───┘
┌─1─┐
│ 3 │
└───┘
Query:
SET union_default_mode = 'ALL';
SELECT 1 UNION SELECT 2 UNION SELECT 3 UNION SELECT 2;
Result:
┌─1─┐
│ 1 │
└───┘
┌─1─┐
│ 2 │
└───┘
┌─1─┐
│ 2 │
└───┘
┌─1─┐
│ 3 │
└───┘
Queries that are parts of UNION/UNION ALL/UNION DISTINCT
can be run simultaneously, and their results can be mixed together.
See Also
- insert_null_as_default setting.
- union_default_mode setting.