Reuse subquery result in WHERE-Clause for INSERT - sql

Question

i am using Microsoft SQL Server 2008
i would like to save the result of a subquery to reuse it in a following subquery.
Is this possible?
What is best practice to do this? (I am very new to SQL)
My query looks like:
INSERT INTO [dbo].[TestTable]
(
[a]
,[b]
)
SELECT
(
SELECT TOP 1 MAT_WS_ID
FROM #TempTableX AS X_ALIAS
WHERE OUTERBASETABLE.LT_ALL_MATERIAL = X_ALIAS.MAT_RM_NAME
)
,(
SELECT TOP 1 MAT_WS_NAME
FROM #TempTableY AS Y_ALIAS
WHERE Y_ALIAS.MAT_WS_ID = MAT_WS_ID
--(
--SELECT TOP 1 MAT_WS_ID
--FROM #TempTableX AS X_ALIAS
--WHERE OUTERBASETABLE.LT_ALL_MATERIAL = X_ALIAS.MAT_RM_NAME
--)
)
FROM [dbo].[LASERTECHNO] AS OUTERBASETABLE
My question is:
Is this correct what i did.
I replaced the second SELECT Statement in the WHERE-Clause for [b] (which is commented out and exactly the same as for [a]), with the result of the first SELECT Statement of [a] (=MAT_WS_ID).
It seems to give the right results.
But i dont understand why!
I mean MAT_WS_ID is part of both temporary tables X_ALIAS and Y_ALIAS.
So in the SELECT statement for [b], in the scope of the [b]-select-query, MAT_WS_ID could only be known from the Y_ALIAS table. (Or am i wrong, i am more a C++, maybe the scope things in SQL and C++ are totally different)
I just wannt to know what is the best way in SQL Server to reuse an scalar select result.
Or should i just dont care and copy the select for every column and the sql server optimizes it by its own?

Answer 1

One approach would be outer apply:
SELECT mat.MAT_WS_ID
, (
SELECT TOP 1 MAT_WS_NAME
FROM #TempTableY AS Y_ALIAS
WHERE Y_ALIAS.MAT_WS_ID = mat.MAT_WS_ID
)
FROM [dbo].[LASERTECHNO] AS OUTERBASETABLE
OUTER APPLY
(
SELECT TOP 1 MAT_WS_ID
FROM #TempTableX AS X_ALIAS
WHERE OUTERBASETABLE.LT_ALL_MATERIAL = X_ALIAS.MAT_RM_NAME
) as mat

Answer 2

You could rank rows in #TempTableX and #TempTableY partitioning them by MAT_RM_NAME in the former and by MAT_WS_ID in the latter, then use normal joins with filtering by rownum = 1 in both tables (rownum being the column containing the ranking numbers in each of the two tables):
WITH x_ranked AS (
SELECT
*,
rownum = ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY MAT_RM_NAME ORDER BY (SELECT 1))
FROM #TempTableX
),
y_ranked AS (
SELECT
*,
rownum = ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY MAT_WS_ID ORDER BY (SELECT 1))
FROM #TempTableY
)
INSERT INTO dbo.TestTable (a, b)
SELECT
x.MAT_WS_ID,
y.MAT_WS_NAME
FROM dbo.LASERTECHNO t
LEFT JOIN x_ranked x ON t.LT_ALL_MATERIAL = x.MAT_RM_NAME AND x.rownum = 1
LEFT JOIN y_ranked y ON x.MAT_WS_ID = y.MAT_WS_ID AND y.rownum = 1
;
The ORDER BY (SELECT 1) bit is a trick to specify an indeterminate ordering, which, accordingly, would result in indeterminate rownum = 1 rows picked by the query. That is to more or less duplicate your TOP 1 without an explicit order, but I would recommend you to specify a more sensible ORDER BY clause to make the results more predictable.