Where 1 = 1 in SQL

After more than 5 years of writing SQL, I found this thing in a colleague’s code. At first, I didn’t see the point.

Juniors are often baffled when they see this condition in their colleagues’ code.

(Personally, the first time I saw it, I thought it was some trick to optimize a join’s performance in certain conditions…)

In reality, it’s just a handy tip.

It’s used to quickly test query results with and without certain conditions.

Here, if we wanted to test the query without the condition work = ‘c-level’, we’d have to move degree = ‘master’ next to WHERE (and remove the AND keyword).

That’s tedious…

The 1=1 trick simply avoids that, saving a bit of time when testing queries. :)

SELECT *
FROM people
WHERE 1 = 1
-- AND degree="master"
AND work="c-level"