What does the "HAVING" clause accomplish in SQL?

The "HAVING" clause in SQL is used specifically to filter groups of records that result from an aggregate function, such as COUNT, SUM, AVG, etc. This is particularly useful when you want to apply a condition to a group of results that is created by the GROUP BY clause.

When you use GROUP BY, SQL organizes the data into groups based on one or more columns. After this grouping, you might want to apply conditions to these groups, which is where the HAVING clause comes into play. For example, if you want to find all departments with a total payroll exceeding a certain amount, you would use an aggregate function within your query, and then apply the HAVING clause to filter these results.

In contrast, the options related to filtering individual records, combining tables, or specifying the order of results pertain to the WHERE clause, JOIN operations, and the ORDER BY clause, respectively, none of which serve the same purpose as HAVING, which is strictly for filtering on aggregate results. Thus, the primary function of HAVING is to apply conditions to grouped aggregate data, making it a critical tool in SQL for summarizing and filtering complex datasets.