Where does the practice “exists (select 1 from …)” come from?

Question

The overwhelming majority of people support my own view that there is no difference between the following statements:

SELECT * FROM tableA WHERE EXISTS (SELE         


        

Answer 1

As a demo, try these

SELECT * FROM tableA WHERE EXISTS (SELECT 1/0 FROM tableB WHERE tableA.x = tableB.y)
SELECT * FROM tableA WHERE EXISTS (SELECT CAST('bollocks' as int) FROM tableB WHERE tableA.x = tableB.y)

Now read the ANSI standard. ANSI-92, page 191, case 3a

If the <select list> "*" is simply contained in a <subquery>
          that is immediately contained in an <exists predicate>, then
          the <select list> is equivalent to a <value expression> that
          is an arbitrary <literal>.

Finally, the behaviour on most RDBMS should ignore THE * in the EXISTS clause. As per this question yesterday ( Sql Server 2005 - Insert if not exists ) this doesn't work on SQL Server 2000 but I know it does on SQL Server 2005+

Answer 2

This question has an answer that says it was some version of MS Access that actually did not ignore the field of the SELECT clause. I have done some Access development, and I have heard that SELECT 1 is best practice, so this seems very likely to me to be the source of the "myth."

Performance of SQL EXISTS usage variants

Answer 3

The main part of your question is - "where did this myth come from?"

So to answer that, I guess one of the first performance hints people learn with sql is that select * is inefficient in most situations. The fact that it isn't inefficient in this specific situation is hence somewhat counter intuitive. So its not surprising that people are skeptical about it. But some simple research or experiments should be enough to banish most myths. Although human history kinda shows that myths are quite hard to banish.

Answer 4

For SQL Server Conor Cunningham from the Query Optimiser team explains why he typically uses SELECT 1

The QP will take and expand all *'s early in the pipeline and bind them to objects (in this case, the list of columns). It will then remove unneeded columns due to the nature of the query.

So for a simple EXISTS subquery like this:

SELECT col1 FROM MyTable WHERE EXISTS (SELECT * FROM Table2 WHERE MyTable.col1=Table2.col2)The * will be expanded to some potentially big column list and then it will be determined that the semantics of the EXISTS does not require any of those columns, so basically all of them can be removed.

"SELECT 1" will avoid having to examine any unneeded metadata for that table during query compilation.

However, at runtime the two forms of the query will be identical and will have identical runtimes.

Edit: However I have looked at this in some detail since posting this answer and come to the conclusion that SELECT 1 does not avoid this column expansion. Full details here.