Introduction
This is just a simple article visually explaining SQL JOINs.
Background
I'm a pretty visual person. Things seem to make more sense as a picture. I looked all over the Internet for a good graphical representation of SQL JOINs, but I couldn't find any to my liking. Some had good diagrams but lacked completeness (they didn't have all the possible JOINs), and some were just plain terrible. So, I decided to create my own and write an article about it.
Using the code
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 JOINLEFT JOINRIGHT JOINOUTER JOINLEFT JOIN EXCLUDING INNER JOINRIGHT JOIN EXCLUDING INNER JOINOUTER 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).
Inner JOIN
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:
Collapse