>>>>> "Rich" == Rich Shepard <rshepard@appl-ecosys.com> writes:
Rich> I found a couple of web pages describing the lateral join yet
Rich> have not correctly applied them. The manual's page did not help
Rich> me get the correct syntax, either. Think I'm close, however:
Rich> select p.person_id, p.lname, p.fname, p.direct_phone, o.org_name, a.next_contact
Rich> from people as p, organizations as o
Rich> lateral
Rich> (select a.next_contact
LATERAL (SELECT ...) is syntactically like (SELECT ...) in that it
comes _after_ a "," in the from-clause or after a [LEFT] JOIN keyword.
Don't think of LATERAL as being a type of join, think of it as
qualifying the (SELECT ...) that follows.
Rich> from activities as a
Rich> where a.next_contact is not null and a.next_contact <= 'today' and
Rich> a.next_contact > '2018-12-31'
You'd want a condition here that references the "people" table; the
whole point of LATERAL is that it opens up the scope of column
references in the subquery to include those tables which are to its left
in the from-clause.
Rich> order by person_id,next_contact);
and I'm guessing you want that ordered by next_contact alone, possibly
with LIMIT 1 to get just the nearest following next_contact time.
--
Andrew (irc:RhodiumToad)