sql - Does anyone use Right Outer Joins?

Question

I use INNER JOIN and LEFT OUTER JOINs all the time. However, I never seem to need RIGHT OUTER JOINs, ever.

I've seen plenty of nasty auto-generated SQL that uses right joins, but to me, that code is impossible to get my head around. I always need to rewrite it using inner and left joins to make heads or tails of it.

Does anyone actually write queries using Right joins?

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/689963/does-anyone-use-right-outer-joins

Answer 1

It depends on what side of the join you put each table.

If you want to return all rows from the left table, even if there are no matches in the right table... you use left join.

If you want to return all rows from the right table, even if there are no matches in the left table, you use right join.

Interestingly enough, I rarely used right joins.