PostgreSQL’s Powerful New Join Type: LATERAL

PostgreSQL 9.3 has a new join type! Lateral joins arrived without a lot of fanfare, but they enable some powerful new queries that were previously only tractable with procedural code. In this post, I’ll walk through a conversion funnel analysis that wouldn’t be possible in PostgreSQL 9.2.

What is a LATERAL join?

The best description in the documentation comes at the bottom of the list of FROM clause options:

The LATERAL key word can precede a sub-SELECT FROM item. This allows the sub-SELECT to refer to columns of FROM items that appear before it in the FROM list. (Without LATERAL, each sub-SELECT is evaluated independently and so cannot cross-reference any other FROMitem.)
…
When a FROM item contains LATERAL cross-references, evaluation proceeds as follows: for each row of the FROM item providing the cross-referenced column(s), or set of rows of multiple FROM items providing the columns, the LATERAL item is evaluated using that row or row set’s values of the columns. The resulting row(s) are joined as usual with the rows they were computed from. This is repeated for each row or set of rows from the column source table(s).