What does it mean by select 1 from table?

Question

I have seen many queries with something as follows.

Select 1  
From table

What does this 1 mean, how will it be executed and,

Answer 1

The result is 1 for every record in the table.

Answer 2

This means that You want a value "1" as output or Most of the time used as Inner Queries because for some reason you want to calculate the outer queries based on the result of inner queries.. not all the time you use 1 but you have some specific values...

This will statically gives you output as value 1.

Answer 3

If you mean something like

SELECT * FROM AnotherTable
  WHERE EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM table WHERE...) 

then it's a myth that the 1 is better than

SELECT * FROM AnotherTable
  WHERE EXISTS (SELECT * FROM table WHERE...) 

The 1 or * in the EXISTS is ignored and you can write this as per Page 191 of the ANSI SQL 1992 Standard:

SELECT * FROM AnotherTable
  WHERE EXISTS (SELECT 1/0 FROM table WHERE...) 

Answer 4

If you just want to check a true or false based on the WHERE clause, select 1 from table where condition is the cheapest way.

Answer 5

it simple means that you are retrieving the number first column from table ,,,,means select Emply_num,Empl_no From Employees ; here you are using select 1 from Employees; that means you are retrieving the Emply_num column. Thanks

Answer 6

This is just used for convenience with IF EXISTS(). Otherwise you can go with

select * from [table_name]

Image In the case of 'IF EXISTS', we just need know that any row with specified condition exists or not doesn't matter what is content of row.

select 1 from Users

above example code, returns no. of rows equals to no. of users with 1 in single column