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Like virtually all relational databases, Oracle allows queries to be generated that combine or JOIN
rows from two or more tables to create the final result set. While there are numerous types of joins that can be performed, the most common are the INNER JOIN
and the OUTER JOIN
.
In this tutorial, we’ll briefly explore the difference between the INNER
and OUTER JOIN
and then examine the shorthand method Oracle provides for performing OUTER JOINS
specifically using the +
operator symbol.
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An INNER JOIN
in a relational database is simply the joining of two or more tables in which the result will only contain data which satisfied all join conditions.
For example, here we have a basic library
schema with two tables: books
and languages
. The languages
table is just a list of possible language names and a unique language id
:
SELECT * FROM library.languages;
id name
1 English
2 French
3 German
4 Mandarin
5 Spanish
6 Arabic
7 Japanese
8 Russian
9 Greek
10 Italian
Meanwhile, our books
table has a language_id
row which for most, but not all, books simply contains the language_id
associated with the original published language of the book:
SELECT * FROM
books
ORDER BY
id
FETCH FIRST 10 ROWS ONLY;
id title author year_published language_id
1 In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust 1913 2
2 Ulysses James Joyce 1922 1
3 Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes 1605 5
4 Moby Dick Herman Melville 1851 1
5 Hamlet William Shakespeare 1601 (null)
6 War and Peace Leo Tolstoy 1869 8
7 The Odyssey Homer -700 9
8 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 1
9 The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri 1472 10
10 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 1857 2
In many cases, we may wish to perform an INNER JOIN
of the books
and languages
tables so rather than viewing the meaningless language_id
value of each book, we can actually see the language name
instead.
SELECT
b.id,
b.title,
b.author,
b.year_published,
l.name language
FROM
books b
INNER JOIN
library.languages l
ON
b.language_id = l.id
ORDER BY
b.id
FETCH FIRST 10 ROWS ONLY;
id title author year_published language
1 In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust 1913 French
2 Ulysses James Joyce 1922 English
3 Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes 1605 Spanish
4 Moby Dick Herman Melville 1851 English
6 War and Peace Leo Tolstoy 1869 Russian
7 The Odyssey Homer -700 Greek
8 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 English
9 The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri 1472 Italian
10 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 1857 French
11 The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoyevsky 1880 Russian
What’s critical to note here is that our result set was slightly different in the above two queries. In the first, we simply listed the first 10
books, but in the INNER JOIN
query we’re only returning results which meet all conditions from both tables. For this reason, the record of Hamlet
(which has a language_id
value of null
or empty) is ignored and not returned in the result of our INNER JOIN
.
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Instead of exclusively returning results which satisfy all join conditions of an INNER JOIN
, an OUTER JOIN
returns not only results which satisfy all conditions, but also returns rows from one table which did not satisfy the condition. The table that is chosen for this “bypass” of conditional requirements is determined by the directionality or “side” of the join, typically referred to as LEFT
or RIGHT
outer joins.
When defining a side to your OUTER JOIN
, you are specifying which table will always return its row even if the opposing table on the other side of the join has missing or null
values as part of the joining condition.
Therefore, if we perform the same basic JOIN
as above to retrieve books
and language names
, we know that our books
table should always return data, so our JOIN
side should “point toward” our books
table, thereby making the languages table the OUTER
table we’re attaching to it.
To accomplish this, we simply change:
books b INNER JOIN library.languages l
…to this:
books b LEFT OUTER JOIN library.languages l
Thus, the entire query and result set looks almost identical to the INNER JOIN
except that minor alteration:
SELECT
b.id,
b.title,
b.author,
b.year_published,
l.name language
FROM
books b
LEFT OUTER JOIN
library.languages l
ON
b.language_id = l.id
ORDER BY
b.id
FETCH FIRST 10 ROWS ONLY;
id title author year_published language
1 In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust 1913 French
2 Ulysses James Joyce 1922 English
3 Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes 1605 Spanish
4 Moby Dick Herman Melville 1851 English
5 Hamlet William Shakespeare 1601 (null)
6 War and Peace Leo Tolstoy 1869 Russian
7 The Odyssey Homer -700 Greek
8 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 English
9 The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri 1472 Italian
10 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 1857 French
As expected, by using a LEFT OUTER JOIN
instead of the previous INNER JOIN
, we’re getting the best of both worlds: We’re not skipping any books
records (such as Hamlet
) simply because the language_id
value is null for that record, yet for all records where language_id
exists, we get the nicely formatted language name
obtained from our languages
table.
Performing Outer Joins using the (+) symbol
As indicated in the official documentation, Oracle provides a special outer join operator
(the +
symbol) that is shorthand for performing OUTER JOINS
.
In practice, the +
symbol is placed directly in the conditional statement and on the side of the optional table (the one which is allowed to contain empty or null
values within the conditional).
Therefore, we can once again rewrite our above LEFT OUTER JOIN
statement using the +
operator like so:
SELECT
b.id,
b.title,
b.author,
b.year_published,
l.name language
FROM
books b,
library.languages l
WHERE
l.id (+)= b.language_id
ORDER BY
b.id
FETCH FIRST 10 ROWS ONLY;
The results are the same as the standard LEFT OUTER JOIN
example above, so we won’t include them here. However, there’s one critical aspect to notice about the syntax using the +
operator for OUTER JOINS
.
The +
operator must be on the left side of the conditional (left of the equals =
sign). Therefore, in this case, because we want to ensure that our languages table is the optional table that can return null
values during this comparison, we swapped the order of the tables in this conditional, so languages
is on the left (and is optional) while books
is on the right.
Lastly, because of this reordering of the table sides in the conditional when using the +
operator, it’s important to realize that the above is simply shorthand for a RIGHT OUTER JOIN
. This means that this snippet of the query:
FROM
books b,
library.languages l
WHERE
l.id (+)= b.language_id
…is effectively identical to this:
FROM
library.languages l
RIGHT OUTER JOIN
books b
ON
b.language_id = l.id