Chapter 7. Pulling apart the FROM clause

Rob Farley

When can you ever have a serious query that doesn’t involve more than one table? Normalization is a wonderful thing and helps ensure that our databases have important characteristics such as integrity. But it also means using JOINs, because it’s unlikely that all the data we need to solve our problem occurs in a single table. Almost always, our FROM clause contains several tables.

In this chapter, I’ll explain some of the deeper, less understood aspects of the FROM clause. I’ll start with some of the basics, to make sure we’re all on the same page. You’re welcome to skip ahead if you’re familiar with the finer points of INNER, OUTER, and CROSS. I’m often amazed by the fact that developers ...

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