Techniques are described herein for subquery removal given two set operation-based subqueries in a query, where one subquery contains the result of the other. The described optimization technique of subquery removal is enabled by join and set operation-based containment of the set operation-based subqueries where semantic equivalence can be established for a given pair of set operation-based subqueries when some table(s)—with associated join condition(s), correlation condition(s), and/or filter predicate(s)—in one subquery are not considered. Subquery removal reduces multiple access to the same table and multiple evaluations of the same join conditions required to evaluate the query. When a subquery is removed from a disjunction, this may lead to other optimizations such as subquery unnesting, e.g., when the original query configuration would not permit query unnesting and the rewritten query (with one or more removed subqueries) permits unnesting.