Subqueries vs CTEs in SQL: A Practical Guide for Data Analysts

💡 How I Finally Understood Subqueries vs CTEs When I first started learning SQL, I remember feeling confident—until I ran into subqueries. At first, they seemed simple. “Just a query inside another query,” I told myself. But the moment I started working with more complex datasets, my queries became harder to read, harder to debug, and honestly… frustrating. Then I discovered CTEs. I still remember rewriting one of my messy nested queries using a CTE—and suddenly, everything made sense. The logi