# Why Your Alias Doesn't Work in WHERE

Imagine you are a company that sells headphones in Spain and we want to expand to France.

You have two tables:

* `orders`: a user bought a headphone and we save it in an order.
    
* `addresses`: responsible for saving the different addresses of the user.
    

And we will fetch `country_code` for our endpoint.

The column `country_code` is not ready yet and it's filled with `NULL`s. So we add `'temporary_code' AS country_code` to have the filter logic ready and we do: `WHERE country_code LIKE '%temporary_code%'` .

```sql
SELECT  order_id,  
        address_id,  
        size,  
        street,  
        country,  
        'temporary_code' AS country_code  
FROM orders  
    LEFT JOIN addresses ON orders.address_id = addresses.id
WHERE country_code LIKE '%temporary_code%'
```

But something is not working correctly... Why?

The order in a SQL execution is:

1. FROM
    
2. WHERE
    
3. SELECT
    

So in this case we will be filtering by the `country_code` column that already exists inside the `addresses` table and not the one in `SELECT`, and this will return empty.

Temporarily you could write:

```SQL
SELECT  order_id,  
        address_id,  
        size,  
        street,  
        country,  
        'temporary_code' AS country_code  
FROM orders  
    LEFT JOIN addresses ON orders.address_id = addresses.id
WHERE 'temporary_code' LIKE '%temporary_code%'
```