SQL JOINs 101

October 2nd, 2018

visual cheat sheet

  • JOIN is used to merge mutliple tables into one
  • LEFT JOIN is often more practical in data representation, because if will display ALL rows from the LEFT table and fill unknown values with NULL - example below

base data

mysql> select * from j1;
+----+------------+
| id | thing      |
+----+------------+
|  1 | hi         |
|  2 | hello      |
|  3 | guten tag  |
|  4 | ciao       |
|  5 | buongiorno |
+----+------------+

mysql> select * from j2;
+----+-----------+
| id | thing     |
+----+-----------+
|  1 | bye       |
|  3 | tschau    |
|  4 | au revoir |
|  6 | so long   |
|  7 | tschuessi |
+----+-----------+

using classic INNER JOIN we’ll obtain only 3 rows

mysql> select * from j1 inner join j2 on j1.id = j2.id;
+----+-----------+----+-----------+
| id | thing     | id | thing     |
+----+-----------+----+-----------+
|  1 | hi        |  1 | bye       |
|  3 | guten tag |  3 | tschau    |
|  4 | ciao      |  4 | au revoir |
+----+-----------+----+-----------+

using LEFT JOIN we get 5 results

mysql> select * from j1 left join j2 on j1.id = j2.id;
+----+------------+------+-----------+
| id | thing      | id   | thing     |
+----+------------+------+-----------+
|  1 | hi         |    1 | bye       |
|  2 | hello      | NULL | NULL      |
|  3 | guten tag  |    3 | tschau    |
|  4 | ciao       |    4 | au revoir |
|  5 | buongiorno | NULL | NULL      |
+----+------------+------+-----------+

rows that do not match are still preserved. This is really usefull when creating views

References:

Karol Świeca

My thougths on JavaScript, AWS Cloud and other aspects of being Software Engineer