a correlated subquery (also known as a synchronized subquery) is a subquery (a query nested inside another query) that uses values from outer query. The subquery is evaluated once for each row processed by the outer query
Here is an example for a typical correlated subquery. In this example we are finding the list of all employees whose salary is above average for their departments.
SELECT employee_number, name
FROM employees AS Bob
WHERE salary > (
SELECT AVG(salary)
FROM employees
WHERE department = Bob.department);
In the above query the outer query is
SELECT employee_number, name
FROM employees AS Bob
WHERE salary > ...
and the inner query (the correlated subquery) is
SELECT AVG(salary)
FROM employees
WHERE department = Bob.department
In the above nested query the inner query has to be re-executed for each employee. (A sufficiently smart implementation may cache the inner query's result on a department-by-department basis, but even in the best case the inner query must be executed once per department. See "Optimizing correlated subqueries" below.)
Correlated subqueries may appear elsewhere besides the WHERE clause; for example, this query uses a correlated subquery in the SELECT clause to print the entire list of employees alongside the average salary for each employee's department. Again, because the subquery is correlated with a column of the outer query, it must be re-executed for each row of the result.
SELECT
employee_number,
name,
(SELECT AVG(salary)
FROM employees
WHERE department = Bob.department) AS department_average
FROM employees AS Bob;