VALUES
Lists
VALUES
provides a way to generate a “constant table”
that can be used in a query without having to actually create and populate
a table on-disk. The syntax is
VALUES ( expression
[, ...] ) [, ...]
Each parenthesized list of expressions generates a row in the table.
The lists must all have the same number of elements (i.e., the number
of columns in the table), and corresponding entries in each list must
have compatible data types. The actual data type assigned to each column
of the result is determined using the same rules as for UNION
(see 10.5절).
As an example:
VALUES (1, 'one'), (2, 'two'), (3, 'three');
will return a table of two columns and three rows. It's effectively equivalent to:
SELECT 1 AS column1, 'one' AS column2 UNION ALL SELECT 2, 'two' UNION ALL SELECT 3, 'three';
By default, PostgreSQL assigns the names
column1
, column2
, etc. to the columns of a
VALUES
table. The column names are not specified by the
SQL standard and different database systems do it differently, so
it's usually better to override the default names with a table alias
list, like this:
=> SELECT * FROM (VALUES (1, 'one'), (2, 'two'), (3, 'three')) AS t (num,letter); num | letter -----+-------- 1 | one 2 | two 3 | three (3 rows)
Syntactically, VALUES
followed by expression lists is
treated as equivalent to:
SELECTselect_list
FROMtable_expression
and can appear anywhere a SELECT
can. For example, you can
use it as part of a UNION
, or attach a
sort_specification
(ORDER BY
,
LIMIT
, and/or OFFSET
) to it. VALUES
is most commonly used as the data source in an INSERT
command,
and next most commonly as a subquery.
For more information see VALUES.