Assuming you're joining on columns with no duplicates, which is a very common case:
An inner join of A and B gives the result of A intersect B, i.e. the inner part of a Venn diagram intersection.
An outer join of A and B gives the results of A union B, i.e. the outer parts of a Venn diagram union.
Examples
Suppose you have two tables, with a single column each, and data as follows:
A B
- -
1 3
2 4
3 5
4 6
Note that (1,2) are unique to A, (3,4) are common, and (5,6) are unique to B.
Inner join
An inner join using either of the equivalent queries gives the intersection of the two tables, i.e. the two rows they have in common.
select * from a INNER JOIN b on a.a = b.b;
select a.*, b.* from a,b where a.a = b.b;
a | b
--+--
3 | 3
4 | 4
Left outer join
A left outer join will give all rows in A, plus any common rows in B.
select * from a LEFT OUTER JOIN b on a.a = b.b;
select a.*, b.* from a,b where a.a = b.b(+);
a | b
--+-----
1 | null
2 | null
3 | 3
4 | 4
Right outer join
A right outer join will give all rows in B, plus any common rows in A.
select * from a RIGHT OUTER JOIN b on a.a = b.b;
select a.*, b.* from a,b where a.a(+) = b.b;
a | b
-----+----
3 | 3
4 | 4
null | 5
null | 6
Full outer join
A full outer join will give you the union of A and B, i.e. all the rows in A and all the rows in B. If something in A doesn't have a corresponding datum in B, then the B portion is null, and vice versa.
select * from a FULL OUTER JOIN b on a.a = b.b;
a | b
-----+-----
1 | null
2 | null
3 | 3
4 | 4
null | 6
null | 5
For InnoDB, the following seems to work: create the new empty database, then rename each table in turn into the new database:
RENAME TABLE old_db.table TO new_db.table;
You will need to adjust the permissions after that.
For scripting in a shell, you can use either of the following:
mysql -u username -ppassword old_db -sNe 'show tables' | while read table; \
do mysql -u username -ppassword -sNe "rename table old_db.$table to new_db.$table"; done
OR
for table in `mysql -u root -ppassword -s -N -e "use old_db;show tables from old_db;"`; do mysql -u root -ppassword -s -N -e "use old_db;rename table old_db.$table to new_db.$table;"; done;
Notes:
- There is no space between the option
-p and the password. If your database has no password, remove the -u username -ppassword part.
If some table has a trigger, it cannot be moved to another database using above method (will result Trigger in wrong schema error). If that is the case, use a traditional way to clone a database and then drop the old one:
mysqldump old_db | mysql new_db
If you have stored procedures, you can copy them afterwards:
mysqldump -R old_db | mysql new_db
Best Answer
All is not lost - you really don't have to use PostgreSQL if you don't want to.
If your database is small enough (which it will have to be since the Heroku PostGres DB is also 5Mb) and you would prefer to remain on mySQL then you could use the ClearDB mySQL addon - http://addons.heroku.com/cleardb - their entry level DB is free and is the same size as the Heroku Shared PostGres DB that you get by default but be careful that the number of connections is limited so don't be going crazy with your web dyno counts.
Once you add the addon if you look at the output of
heroku configthen you can use the DATABASE_URL to create a connection in your favourite mySQL administration tool locally to restore/backup etc data to ClearDB. You may even find heroku db:push would work but personally I've not tried that so would be guessing.