A query creates a virtual table based on existing tables or constants built into tables.
You can arbitrarily put parentheses around queries, or use the parentheses to control the order of evaluation of the INTERSECT, EXCEPT, or UNION operations. These operations are evaluated from left to right when no parentheses are present, with the exception of INTERSECT operations, which would be evaluated before any UNION or EXCEPT operations.
The ALL and DISTINCT keywords determine whether duplicates are eliminated from the result of the operation. If you specify the DISTINCT keyword, then the result will have no duplicate rows. If you specify the ALL keyword, then there may be duplicates in the result, depending on whether there were duplicates in the input. DISTINCT is the default, so if you don't specify ALL or DISTINCT, the duplicates will be eliminated. For example, UNION builds an intermediate ResultSet with all of the rows from both queries and eliminates the duplicate rows before returning the remaining rows. UNION ALL returns all rows from both queries as the result.
Depending on which operation is specified, if the number of copies of a row in the left table is L and the number of copies of that row in the right table is R, then the number of duplicates of that particular row that the output table contains (assuming the ALL keyword is specified) is: