Why do I need to use a sub query to filter down a grouped select?

If I do this --

SELECT dv.Name
      ,MAX(hb.[DateEntered]) as DE
FROM 
    [Devices] as dv
    INNER JOIN 
    [Heartbeats] as hb ON hb.DeviceID = dv.ID
WHERE DE < '2013-03-04'
GROUP BY dv.Name

I get this error --


Msg 207, Level 16, State 1, Line 17 Invalid column name 'DE'.

If I do this --

SELECT Name, DE FROM (
    SELECT dv.Name
          ,MAX(hb.[DateEntered]) as DE
    FROM 
        [Devices] as dv
        INNER JOIN 
        [Heartbeats] as hb ON hb.DeviceID = dv.ID
    GROUP BY dv.Name
) as tmp WHERE tmp.DE < '2013-03-04'

it works as expected.

Can someone explain why I need to nest my main query as a subquery to limit my data set?

Also, is there maybe a better way to achieve the goal here? Retrieve all records from one table, and the single "top" related record ordered by [DateEntered] descending?

You can't reference an alias in the WHERE clause - this is just because of the order in which SQL Server parses the statement.

There have been many discussions about this here and on StackOverflow. A couple of examples that give some background:

https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/19762/why-is-the-select-clause-listed-first/

Why are queries parsed in such a way that disallows the use of column aliases in most clauses?

An alternative would be:

SELECT dv.Name
      ,MAX(hb.[DateEntered]) as DE
FROM 
    [Devices] as dv
    INNER JOIN 
    [Heartbeats] as hb ON hb.DeviceID = dv.ID
GROUP BY dv.Name
HAVING MAX(hb.[DateEntered]) < '20130304';

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#35932, answer score: 6