Sometimes a developer needs to issue a query without a FROM clause. This especially occurs using the QueryBuilder, when you may or may not have a table to select from, but call a stored procedure always.

Example:

$query = $em>createQuery('SELECT (1+1)');

The above query fails because the lexer expects T_FROM. If you replace (1+1) with a stored procedure, this example makes more sense.

One might argue about that you should use DBAL directly, but I disagree, because it always can happen that you end up in a situation like this:

$qb = $em->createQueryBuilder();

$qb->select("SOMEFANCYPROCEDURE()");

if ($condition) {
  $qb = $qb->from("additionalTable t");
}