I am going to discuss seven different ways you can return data from two relational tables. I will be excluding cross Joins and self referencing Joins. The seven Joins I will discuss are shown below:
INNER JOIN
LEFT JOIN
RIGHT JOIN
OUTER JOIN
LEFT JOIN EXCLUDING INNER JOIN
RIGHT JOIN EXCLUDING INNER JOIN
OUTER JOIN EXCLUDING INNER JOIN
For the sake of this article, I'll refer to 5, 6, and 7 as LEFT EXCLUDING JOIN
, RIGHT EXCLUDING JOIN
, and OUTER EXCLUDING JOIN
, respectively. Some may argue that 5, 6, and 7 are not really joining the two tables, but for simplicity, I will still refer to these as Joins because you use a SQL Join in each of these queries (but exclude some records with a WHERE
clause).
This is the simplest, most understood Join and is the most common. This query will return all of the records in the left table (table A) that have a matching record in the right table (table B). This Join is written as follows:
SELECT <select_list>
FROM Table_A A
INNER JOIN Table_B B
ON A.Key = B.Key
This query will return all of the records in the left table (table A) regardless if any of those records have a match in the right table (table B). It will also return any matching records from the right table. This Join is written as follows:
SELECT <select_list>
FROM Table_A A
LEFT JOIN Table_B B
ON A.Key = B.Key
This query will return all of the records in the right table (table B) regardless if any of those records have a match in the left table (table A). It will also return any matching records from the left table. This Join is written as follows:
SELECT <select_list>
FROM Table_A A
RIGHT JOIN Table_B B
ON A.Key = B.Key
This Join can also be referred to as a FULL OUTER JOIN
or a FULL JOIN
. This query will return all of the records from both tables, joining records from the left table (table A) that match records from the right table (table B). This Join is written as follows:
SELECT <select_list>
FROM Table_A A
FULL OUTER JOIN Table_B B
ON A.Key = B.Key
This query will return all of the records in the left table (table A) that do not match any records in the right table (table B). This Join is written as follows:
SELECT <select_list>
FROM Table_A A
LEFT JOIN Table_B B
ON A.Key = B.Key
WHERE B.Key IS NULL
This query will return all of the records in the right table (table B) that do not match any records in the left table (table A). This Join is written as follows:
SELECT <select_list>
FROM Table_A A
RIGHT JOIN Table_B B
ON A.Key = B.Key
WHERE A.Key IS NULL
This query will return all of the records in the left table (table A) and all of the records in the right table (table B) that do not match. I have yet to have a need for using this type of Join, but all of the others, I use quite frequently. This Join is written as follows:
SELECT <select_list>
FROM Table_A A
FULL OUTER JOIN Table_B B
ON A.Key = B.Key
WHERE A.Key IS NULL OR B.Key IS NULL
另附:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sql_join