You can use select expressions, by themselves or as part of other SQL statements, in interactive SQL or in host language programs. SQL evaluates the arguments in a select clause in the following order: 1. FROM 2. WHERE 3. GROUP BY 4. HAVING 5. Select list 6. ORDER BY 7. OFFSET 8. LIMIT TO (or FETCH FIRST) After each of these clauses, SQL produces an intermediate result table that is used in evaluating the next clause. The optimizer finds the fastest way of doing this without changing the result.