Suppose that we need to find all triples of student names for students who live in the same city and state. Now we need to operate with three distinct copies of the table STUDENTS. This is accomplished by:
select S1.name as name1, S2.name as name2, S3.name as name3
from STUDENTS S1, STUDENTS S2, STUDENTS S3
where S1.state = S2.state and S2.state = S3.state and