A SQL join clause combines records from two or more tables in a database.

[1] It creates a set that

can be saved as a table or used as is. A JOIN is a means for combining fields from two tables by
using values common to each. ANSI standard SQL specifies four types of JOINs: INNER, OUTER,
LEFT, and RIGHT. In special cases, a table (base table, view, or joined table) can JOIN to itself in
a self-join.

A programmer writes a JOIN predicate to identify the records for joining. If the evaluated
predicate is true, the combined record is then produced in the expected format, a record set or a
temporary table.

[edit] Sample tables

All subsequent explanations on join types in this article make use of the following two tables.
The rows in these tables serve to illustrate the effect of different types of joins and join-
predicates. In the following tables the DepartmentID column of the Department table (which
can be designated as Department.DepartmentID) is the primary key, while
Employee.DepartmentID is a foreign key.

Employee Table
LastName DepartmentID
Rafferty 31
Jones 33
Steinberg 33
Robinson 34
Smith 34
John NULL

Department Table
DepartmentID DepartmentName
31 Sales
33 Engineering
34 Clerical
35 Marketing

Note: The "Marketing" Department currently has no listed employees. Also, employee "John"
has not been assigned to any Department yet.

[edit] Inner join

An inner join is the most common join operation used in applications and can be regarded
as the default join-type. Inner join creates a new result table by combining column values
of two tables (A and B) based upon the join-predicate. The query compares each row of A
with each row of B to find all pairs of rows which satisfy the join-predicate. When the join-
predicate is satisfied, column values for each matched pair of rows of A and B are
combined into a result row. The result of the join can be defined as the outcome of first taking
the Cartesian product (or cross-join) of all records in the tables (combining every record in table
A with every record in table B)—then return all records which satisfy the join predicate. Actual
SQL implementations normally use other approaches like a hash join or a sort-merge join where
possible, since computing the Cartesian product is very inefficient.

SQL specifies two different syntactical ways to express joins: "explicit join notation" and
"implicit join notation".

The "explicit join notation" uses the JOIN keyword to specify the table to join, and the ON
keyword to specify the predicates for the join, as in the following example:

SELECT *
FROM employee INNER JOIN department
ON employee.DepartmentID = department.DepartmentID;

The "implicit join notation" simply lists the tables for joining (in the FROM clause of the
SELECT statement), using commas to separate them. Thus, it specifies a cross-join, and the
WHERE clause may apply additional filter-predicates (which function comparably to the join-
predicates in the explicit notation).

The following example shows a query which is equivalent to the one from the previous
examples, but this time written using the implicit join notation:

SELECT *
FROM employee, department
WHERE employee.DepartmentID = department.DepartmentID;

The queries given in the examples above will join the Employee and Department tables using the
DepartmentID column of both tables. Where the DepartmentID of these tables match (i.e. the
join-predicate is satisfied), the query will combine the LastName, DepartmentID and
DepartmentName columns from the two tables into a result row. Where the DepartmentID does
not match, no result row is generated.

Thus the result of the execution of either of the two queries above will be:

Employee.LastNa Employee.Departmen Department.DepartmentN Department.Departmen

me tID ame tID
Robinson 34 Clerical 34
Jones 33 Engineering 33
Smith 34 Clerical 34
Steinberg 33 Engineering 33
Rafferty 31 Sales 31
Note: Programmers should take special care when joining tables on columns that can contain
NULL values, since NULL will never match any other value (or even NULL itself), unless the
join condition explicitly uses the IS NULL or IS NOT NULL predicates.

Notice that the employee "John" and the department "Marketing" do not appear in the query
execution results. Neither of these has any matching records in the respective other table: "John"
has no associated department, and no employee has the department ID 35. Thus, no information
on John or on Marketing appears in the joined table. Depending on the desired results, this
behavior may be a subtle bug. Outer joins may be used to avoid it.

One can further classify inner joins as equi-joins, as natural joins, or as cross-joins.

[edit] Equi-join

An equi-join, also known as an equijoin, is a specific type of comparator-based join, or

theta join, that uses only equality comparisons in the join-predicate. Using other comparison
operators (such as <) disqualifies a join as an equi-join. The query shown above has already
provided an example of an equi-join:

SELECT *
FROM employee
EQUI JOIN department
ON employee.DepartmentID = department.DepartmentID;

SQL provides an optional shorthand notation for expressing equi-joins, by way of the USING
construct:

SELECT *
FROM employee
INNER JOIN department
USING (DepartmentID);

The USING construct is more than mere syntactic sugar, however, since the result set differs from
the result set of the version with the explicit predicate. Specifically, any columns mentioned in
the USING list will appear only once, with an unqualified name, rather than once for each table in
the join. In the above case, there will be a single DepartmentID column and no
employee.DepartmentID or department.DepartmentID.

The USING clause is not supported by SQL Server 2005 and Sybase.

Natural join

A natural join offers a further specialization of equi-joins. The join predicate arises implicitly
by comparing all columns in both tables that have the same column-name in the joined
tables. The resulting joined table contains only one column for each pair of equally-named
columns.
Most experts agree that NATURAL JOINs are dangerous and therefore strongly discourage
usage.[2]

The above sample query for inner joins can be expressed as a natural join in the following way:

SELECT *
FROM employee NATURAL JOIN department;

As with the explicit USING clause, only one DepartmentID column occurs in the joined table,
with no qualifier:

DepartmentID Employee.LastName Department.DepartmentName

34 Smith Clerical
33 Jones Engineering
34 Robinson Clerical
33 Steinberg Engineering
31 Rafferty Sales

[edit] Cross join

Example of an explicit cross join:

SELECT *
FROM employee CROSS JOIN department;

Example of an implicit cross join:

SELECT *
FROM employee, department;
Employee.LastNa Employee.Departmen Department.DepartmentN Department.Departmen
me tID ame tID
Rafferty 31 Sales 31
Jones 33 Sales 31
Steinberg 33 Sales 31
Smith 34 Sales 31
Robinson 34 Sales 31
John NULL Sales 31
Rafferty 31 Engineering 33
Jones 33 Engineering 33
Steinberg 33 Engineering 33
Smith 34 Engineering 33
Robinson 34 Engineering 33
John NULL Engineering 33
Rafferty 31 Clerical 34
Jones 33 Clerical 34
 Steinberg 33 Clerical 34
Smith 34 Clerical 34
Robinson 34 Clerical 34
John NULL Clerical 34
Rafferty 31 Marketing 35
Jones 33 Marketing 35
Steinberg 33 Marketing 35
Smith 34 Marketing 35
Robinson 34 Marketing 35
John NULL Marketing 35

The cross join does not apply any predicate to filter records from the joined table. Programmers
can further filter the results of a cross join by using a WHERE clause.

[edit] Outer joins

An outer join does not require each record in the two joined tables to have a matching record.
The joined table retains each record—even if no other matching record exists. Outer joins
subdivide further into left outer joins, right outer joins, and full outer joins, depending on
which table(s) one retains the rows from (left, right, or both).

(In this case left and right refer to the two sides of the JOIN keyword.)

No implicit join-notation for outer joins exists in standard SQL.

[edit] Left outer join

The result of a left outer join (or simply left join) for table A and B always contains all
records of the "left" table (A), even if the join-condition does not find any matching record
in the "right" table (B). This means that if the ON clause matches 0 (zero) records in B, the join
will still return a row in the result—but with NULL in each column from B. This means that a
left outer join returns all the values from the left table, plus matched values from the right
table (or NULL in case of no matching join predicate). If the right table returns one row and the
left table returns more than one matching row for it, the values in the right table will be repeated
for each distinct row on the left table.

For example, this allows us to find an employee's department, but still shows the employee(s)
even when they have not been assigned to a department (contrary to the inner-join example
above, where unassigned employees are excluded from the result).

Example of a left outer join, with the additional result row italicized:

SELECT *
FROM employee LEFT OUTER JOIN department
ON employee.DepartmentID = department.DepartmentID;
Employee.LastNa Employee.Departmen Department.DepartmentN Department.Departmen
me tID ame tID
Jones 33 Engineering 33
Rafferty 31 Sales 31
Robinson 34 Clerical 34
Smith 34 Clerical 34
John NULL NULL NULL

Steinberg 33 Engineering 33

Oracle supports the alternate syntax:

SELECT * FROM employee, department WHERE employee.DepartmentID =

department.DepartmentID(+)

Sybase supports the alternate syntax:

SELECT * FROM employee, department WHERE employee.DepartmentID *=

department.DepartmentID

[edit] Right outer join

A right outer join (or right join) closely resembles a left outer join, except with the treatment of
the tables reversed. Every row from the "right" table (B) will appear in the joined table at least
once. If no matching row from the "left" table (A) exists, NULL will appear in columns from A
for those records that have no match in B. A right outer join returns all the values from the right
table and matched values from the left table (NULL in case of no matching join predicate). For
example, this allows us to find each employee and his or her department, but still show
departments that have no employees. Below is shown an example of right outer join, with the
additional result row italicized:

SELECT *
FROM employee RIGHT OUTER JOIN department
ON employee.DepartmentID = department.DepartmentID;
Employee.LastNa Employee.Departmen Department.DepartmentN Department.Departmen
me tID ame tID
Smith 34 Clerical 34
Jones 33 Engineering 33
Robinson 34 Clerical 34
Steinberg 33 Engineering 33
Rafferty 31 Sales 31
NULL NULL Marketing 35

In practice, explicit right outer joins are rarely used, since they can always be replaced with left
outer joins (with the table order switched) and provide no additional functionality. The result
above is produced also with a left outer join:
SELECT *
FROM department LEFT OUTER JOIN employee
ON employee.DepartmentID = department.DepartmentID;

[edit] Full outer join

Conceptually, a full outer join combines the effect of applying both left and right outer joins.
Where records in the FULL OUTER JOINed tables do not match, the result set will have NULL
values for every column of the table that lacks a matching row. For those records that do match,
a single row will be produced in the result set (containing fields populated from both tables).

For example, this allows us to see each employee who is in a department and each department
that has an employee, but also see each employee who is not part of a department and each
department which doesn't have an employee.

Example full outer join:

SELECT *
FROM employee
FULL OUTER JOIN department
ON employee.DepartmentID = department.DepartmentID;
Employee.LastNa Employee.Departmen Department.DepartmentN Department.Departmen
me tID ame tID
Smith 34 Clerical 34
Jones 33 Engineering 33
Robinson 34 Clerical 34
John NULL NULL NULL

Steinberg 33 Engineering 33
Rafferty 31 Sales 31
NULL NULL Marketing 35

Some database systems (like MySQL) do not support this functionality directly, but they can
emulate it through the use of left and right outer joins and unions. The same example can appear
as follows:

SELECT *
FROM employee
LEFT JOIN department
ON employee.DepartmentID = department.DepartmentID
UNION
SELECT *
FROM employee
RIGHT JOIN department
ON employee.DepartmentID = department.DepartmentID;

SQLite does not support right join, so outer join can be emulated as follows:

SELECT employee.*, department.*

FROM employee
 LEFT JOIN department
ON employee.DepartmentID = department.DepartmentID
UNION ALL
SELECT employee.*, department.*
FROM department
LEFT JOIN employee
ON employee.DepartmentID = department.DepartmentID
WHERE employee.DepartmentID IS NULL;

[edit] Self-join
A self-join is joining a table to itself. This is best illustrated by an example.

[edit] Example

A query to find all pairings of two employees in the same country is desired. If you had two
separate tables for employees and a query which requested employees in the first table having
the same country as employees in the second table, you could use a normal join operation to find
the answer table. However, all the employee information is contained within a single large table.
[4]

Considering a modified Employee table such as the following:

Employee Table
EmployeeID LastName Country DepartmentID
123 Rafferty Australia 31
124 Jones Australia 33
145 Steinberg Australia 33
201 Robinson United States 34
305 Smith Germany 34
306 John Germany NULL

An example solution query could be as follows:

SELECT F.EmployeeID, F.LastName, S.EmployeeID, S.LastName, F.Country

FROM Employee F, Employee S
WHERE F.Country = S.Country
AND F.EmployeeID < S.EmployeeID
ORDER BY F.EmployeeID, S.EmployeeID;

Which results in the following table being generated.

Employee Table after Self-join by Country

EmployeeID LastName EmployeeID LastName Country
123 Rafferty 124 Jones Australia
123 Rafferty 145 Steinberg Australia
124 Jones 145 Steinberg Australia
 305 Smith 306 John Germany

For this example, note that:

 F and S are aliases for the first and second copies of the employee table.
 The condition F.Country = S.Country excludes pairings between employees in
different countries. The example question only wanted pairs of employees in the same
country.
 The condition F.EmployeeID < S.EmployeeID excludes pairings where the
EmployeeIDs are the same.
 F.EmployeeID < S.EmployeeID also excludes duplicate pairings. Without it, the
following less useful table would be generated (the table below displays only the
"Germany" portion of the result):

EmployeeID LastName EmployeeID LastName Country

305 Smith 305 Smith Germany
305 Smith 306 John Germany
306 John 305 Smith Germany
306 John 306 John Germany

Only one of the two middle pairings is needed to satisfy the original question, and the topmost
and bottommost are of no interest at all in this example.

[edit] Merge rows

To be able to do a select so as to merge multiple rows into 1 row : "group_concat notation".

MySQL uses the group_concat keyword to achieve that goal, and PostgreSQL 9.0 has the
string_agg function. Versions before 9.0 required the use of something like

array_to_string(array_agg(value),', ')

or the creation of an aggregate function.

Using the Employee Table:

LastName DepartmentID
Rafferty 31
Jones 33
Steinberg 33
Robinson 34
Smith 34
John NULL

to achieve the following results Table

 DepartmentID LastNames
NULL John
31 Rafferty
33 Jones, Steinberg
34 Robinson, Smith

[edit] MySQL

SELECT DepartmentID, group_concat(LastName) AS LastNames

FROM employee
GROUP BY DepartmentID;

[edit] PostgreSQL

First the function _group_concat and aggregate group_concat need to be created before that
query can be possible.

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION _group_concat(text, text)

RETURNS text AS $$
SELECT CASE
WHEN $2 IS NULL THEN $1
WHEN $1 IS NULL THEN $2
ELSE $1 operator(pg_catalog.||) ', ' operator(pg_catalog.||) $2
END
$$ IMMUTABLE LANGUAGE SQL;

error// JOIN SQL

CREATE AGGREGATE group_concat (
BASETYPE = text,
SFUNC = _group_concat,
STYPE = text
);

SELECT DepartmentID, group_concat(LastName) AS LastNames

FROM employee
GROUP BY DepartmentID;

As for version 9.0:

SELECT DepartmentID, string_agg(LastName, ', ') AS LastNames

FROM employee
GROUP BY DepartmentID;
[edit] Alternatives
The effect of outer joins can also be obtained using correlated subqueries. For example

SELECT employee.LastName, employee.DepartmentID, department.DepartmentName

FROM employee LEFT OUTER JOIN department
ON employee.DepartmentID = department.DepartmentID;

can also be written as

SELECT employee.LastName, employee.DepartmentID,

(SELECT department.DepartmentName
FROM department
WHERE department.DepartmentID = employee.DepartmentID ) AS DepartmentName
FROM employee;

[edit] Implementation
Much work in database-systems has aimed at efficient implementation of joins, because
relational systems commonly call for joins, yet face difficulties in optimising their efficient
execution. The problem arises because inner joins operate both commutatively and associatively.
In practice, this means that the user merely supplies the list of tables for joining and the join
conditions to use, and the database system has the task of determining the most efficient way to
perform the operation. A query optimizer determines how to execute a query containing joins. A
query optimizer has two basic freedoms:

1. Join order: Because joins function commutatively and associatively, the order in which
the system joins tables does not change the final result-set of the query. However, join-
order does have an enormous impact on the cost of the join operation, so choosing the
best join order becomes very important.
2. Join method: Given two tables and a join condition, multiple algorithms can produce the
result-set of the join. Which algorithm runs most efficiently depends on the sizes of the
input tables, the number of rows from each table that match the join condition, and the
operations required by the rest of the query.

Many join-algorithms treat their inputs differently. One can refer to the inputs to a join as the
"outer" and "inner" join operands, or "left" and "right", respectively. In the case of nested loops,
for example, the database system will scan the entire inner relation for each row of the outer
relation.

One can classify query-plans involving joins as follows:[5]

left-deep 
using a base table (rather than another join) as the inner operand of each join in the plan
right-deep 
using a base table as the outer operand of each join in the plan
bushy 
 neither left-deep nor right-deep; both inputs to a join may themselves result from joins

These names derive from the appearance of the query plan if drawn as a tree, with the outer join
relation on the left and the inner relation on the right (as convention dictates).