OUTER JOINs

Depending on how you want to analyze the data, the INNER JOIN we learned in last lesson might not be sufficient because the resulting table only contains data that belongs in both of the tables.

If the two tables have asymmetric data, which can easily happen when data is entered in different stages, then we would have to use a LEFT JOIN, RIGHT JOIN or FULL JOIN instead to ensure that the data you need is not left out of the results.

--Select query with LEFT/RIGHT/FULL JOINs on multiple tables
SELECT column, another_column, …
FROM mytable
INNER/LEFT/RIGHT/FULL JOIN another_table 
    ON mytable.id = another_table.matching_id
WHERE condition(s)
ORDER BY column, … ASC/DESC
LIMIT num_limit OFFSET num_offset;

Like the INNER JOIN these three new joins have to specify which column to join the data on.

When joining table A to table B, a LEFT JOIN simply includes rows from A regardless of whether a matching row is found in B. The RIGHT JOIN is the same, but reversed, keeping rows in B regardless of whether a match is found in A. Finally, a FULL JOIN simply means that rows from both tables are kept, regardless of whether a matching row exists in the other table.

When using any of these new joins, you will likely have to write additional logic to deal with NULLs in the result and constraints (more on this in the next lesson).

You might see queries with these joins written as LEFT OUTER JOIN, RIGHT OUTER JOIN, or FULL OUTER JOIN, but the OUTER keyword is really kept for SQL-92 compatibility and these queries are simply equivalent to LEFT JOIN, RIGHT JOIN, and FULL JOIN respectively.