Combining Queries

PostgreSQL 8.4.2 Documentation
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# 7.4. Combining Queries

The results of two queries can be combined using the set operations union, intersection, and difference. The syntax is

    query1 UNION [ALL] query2
    query1 INTERSECT [ALL] query2
    query1 EXCEPT [ALL] query2

`query1` and `query2` are queries that can use any of the features discussed up to this point. Set operations can also be nested and chained, for example

    query1 UNION query2 UNION query3

which is executed as:

    (query1 UNION query2) UNION query3

`UNION` effectively appends the result of `query2` to the result of `query1` (although there is no guarantee that this is the order in which the rows are actually returned). Furthermore, it eliminates duplicate rows from its result, in the same way as `DISTINCT`, unless `UNION ALL` is used.

`INTERSECT` returns all rows that are both in the result of `query1` and in the result of `query2`. Duplicate rows are eliminated unless `INTERSECT ALL` is used.

`EXCEPT` returns all rows that are in the result of `query1` but not in the result of `query2`. (This is sometimes called the difference between two queries.) Again, duplicates are eliminated unless `EXCEPT ALL` is used.

In order to calculate the union, intersection, or difference of two queries, the two queries must be "union compatible", which means that they return the same number of columns and the corresponding columns have compatible data types, as described in Section 10.5.

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