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Software Engineering vocabulary · Databases and Persistence

Alias

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

/ˈeɪliəs/nounCommon term

In software engineering, alias means: A temporary short name given to a table or column inside a query, usually with the AS keyword, to make the query shorter or the output clearer.

In Turkish: takma ad, alias, kısa ad

How it is used

Table aliases like 'FROM customers c' are standard when joining many tables. Column aliases rename output, for example SUM(amount) AS total_sales. Note that in most databases you cannot use a column alias in the WHERE clause of the same query.

Example sentences

  1. Give the subquery in the FROM clause an alias, otherwise MySQL throws an error.

  2. Use clear aliases like ord and cust instead of a, b and c.

Common collocations

  • table alias
  • column alias
  • give an alias
  • AS keyword
  • SELECT statementThe SQL statement that reads data from one or more tables and returns the matching rows without changing anything in the database.
  • joinA SQL operation that combines rows from two or more tables using a related column, such as a customer ID. As a verb, to join tables means to combine them this way.
  • subqueryA query written inside another query, in brackets, whose result is used by the outer query, for example as a list of values to filter by.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Databases and Persistence

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