Using SELECT in the WHERE clause of another SELECT

I have made a draft remote application on top of libpq for PostrgreSQL. It behaves well, but I have profiled the general functioning of the application. For each final business result that I produce, it happens that I call something like 40 select clause (over tcpip).

I have reminiscences from SQL-Server reminding me to minimize the number of interactions between my remote application and the database. Having analyzed my selects, I do think I could reduce this number to 3 SELECT clauses, using joins. But I don't remember the syntax for using the result of a SELECT in another SELECT.

E.g.:

SELECT * FROM individual
INNER JOIN publisher
ON individual.individual_id = publisher.individual_id
WHERE individual.individual_id = 'here I would like to use the results of a another select'

This other SELECT would be simply of the kind:

SELECT identifier FROM another_table WHERE something='something'

Here is the simplified tables layout, declined a number of times for different item_types ... (3 totally different types, hence the 3 SQL queries if optimized).

table passage
  id_passage PK
  business_field_passage bytea

table item
  id_item PK
  id_passage FK
  business_field_item text

table item_detail
  id_item_detail PK
  id_item FK
  business_field_item_detail text
  image_content bytea

There are several id_item for one id_passage.

There are several id_item_detail for one id_item.

How would you write that?

What is the name for describing the action of redirecting one select into another (if any)?

Is this what you're aiming for? Make sure the fields that are being compared are comparable (i.e. both fields are numeric, text, boolean, etc).

SELECT * FROM Individual
INNER JOIN Publisher
ON Individual.IndividualId = Publisher.IndividualId
WHERE Individual.IndividualId = (SELECT someID FROM table WHERE blahblahblah)

If you wish to select based on multiple values:

SELECT * FROM Individual
INNER JOIN Publisher
ON Individual.IndividualId = Publisher.IndividualId
WHERE Individual.IndividualId IN (SELECT someID FROM table WHERE blahblahblah)

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#33553, answer score: 52