Left and Right Joins
LEFT OUTER JOIN can be used when you want to retrieve the data from the main table (table1) even if there is no match in other tables (table_2, table_3....). While RIGHT OUTER JOIN is used to retrieve the data the from all other tables (table_2, table_3...) even if there is no match in the main table. As an example, in our classicalmodels sample database, when the company wants to establish a new office, the SQL script to insert a new office to the databse as follows:
INSERT INTO classicmodels.offices
(officeCode, city, phone, addressLine1, addressLine2, state, country, postalCode, territory)
VALUES ('8', 'Boston', '+1 215 837 0825', '1550 dummy street', 'dummy address', 'MA', 'USA', '02107', 'NA')
At this time, the company hasn't hired any new employees yet, so the new office does not have any employees. If we want to know which employees belong to what offices and all the offices of the company, we can use RIGHT JOIN as follows:
SELECT firstname,
lastname,
addressLine1
FROM employees as e RIGHT OUTER JOIN offices as o
ON o.officeCode = e.officeCode
The Right join on offices will cause all records from the offices table (the table on the right in the join stmt) to display, even if there is not a corresponding record in the employees table. Notice the last record contains null values for the first and last name values pulled from employees table. This is because there are no records in the employees table with an office code of 8 (the boston office we just added to the office table.)
+-----------+-----------+--------------------------+
| firstname | lastname | addressLine1 |
+-----------+-----------+--------------------------+
| Mary | Patterson | 100 Market Street |
| Diane | Murphy | 100 Market Street |
| Jeff | Firrelli | 100 Market Street |
| Anthony | Bow | 100 Market Street |
| Leslie | Jennings | 100 Market Street |
| Leslie | Thompson | 100 Market Street |
| Julie | Firrelli | 1550 Court Place |
| Steve | Patterson | 1550 Court Place |
| FoonYue | Tseng | 523 East 53rd Street |
| George | Vanauf | 523 East 53rd Street |
| Gerard | Bondur | 43 Rue JouffroyD'abbans |
| Loui | Bondur | 43 Rue JouffroyD'abbans |
| Gerard | Hernandez | 43 Rue JouffroyD'abbans |
| Pamela | Castillo | 43 Rue JouffroyD'abbans |
| Martin | Gerard | 43 Rue JouffroyD'abbans |
| Mami | Nishi | 4-1 Kioicho |
| Yoshimi | Kato | 4-1 Kioicho |
| William | Patterson | 5-11 Wentworth Avenue |
| Andy | Fixter | 5-11 Wentworth Avenue |
| Peter | Marsh | 5-11 Wentworth Avenu |
| Tom | King | 5-11 Wentworth Avenue |
| Larry | Bott | 25 Old Broad Street |
| Barry | Jones | 25 Old Broad Street |
| NULL | NULL | 1550 dummy street |
+-----------+-----------+--------------------------+
24 rows in set (0.00 sec)
As you can see, the RIGHT JOIN get the all the data from second table (offices) and data from the first table even the condition does not match.