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
The CASE
statement is the closest to IF in SQL and is supported on all versions of SQL Server.
SELECT CAST(
CASE
WHEN Obsolete = 'N' or InStock = 'Y'
THEN 1
ELSE 0
END AS bit) as Saleable, *
FROM Product
You only need to use the CAST
operator if you want the result as a Boolean value. If you are happy with an int
, this works:
SELECT CASE
WHEN Obsolete = 'N' or InStock = 'Y'
THEN 1
ELSE 0
END as Saleable, *
FROM Product
CASE
statements can be embedded in other CASE
statements and even included in aggregates.
SQL Server Denali (SQL Server 2012) adds the IIF statement which is also available in access (pointed out by Martin Smith):
SELECT IIF(Obsolete = 'N' or InStock = 'Y', 1, 0) as Saleable, * FROM Product
Best Answer
Look at an index like this:
See how restricting on A first, as your first column eliminates more results than restricting on your second column first? It's easier if you picture how the index must be traversed across, column 1, then column 2, etc...you see that lopping off most of the results in the fist pass makes the 2nd step that much faster.
Another case, if you queried on column 3, the optimizer wouldn't even use the index, because it's not helpful at all in narrowing down the result sets. Anytime you're in a query, narrowing down the number of results to deal with before the next step means better performance.
Since the index is also stored this way, there's no backtracking across the index to find the first column when you're querying on it.
In short: No, it's not for show, there are real performance benefits.