How to do a FULL OUTER JOIN in MySQL?
You don't have FULL JOINS on MySQL, but you can sure emulate them.
For a code SAMPLE transcribed from this SO question you have:
with two tables t1, t2:
SELECT * FROM t1
LEFT JOIN t2 ON t1.id = t2.id
UNION
SELECT * FROM t1
RIGHT JOIN t2 ON t1.id = t2.id
The query above works for special cases where a FULL OUTER JOIN operation would not produce any duplicate rows. The query above depends on the UNION set operator to remove duplicate rows introduced by the query pattern. We can avoid introducing duplicate rows by using an anti-join pattern for the second query, and then use a UNION ALL set operator to combine the two sets. In the more general case, where a FULL OUTER JOIN would return duplicate rows, we can do this:
SELECT * FROM t1
LEFT JOIN t2 ON t1.id = t2.id
UNION ALL
SELECT * FROM t1
RIGHT JOIN t2 ON t1.id = t2.id
WHERE t1.id IS NULL
The answer that Pablo Santa Cruz gave is correct; however, in case anybody stumbled on this page and wants more clarification, here is a detailed breakdown.
Example Tables
Suppose we have the following tables:
-- t1
id name
1 Tim
2 Marta
-- t2
id name
1 Tim
3 Katarina
Inner Joins
An inner join, like this:
SELECT *
FROM `t1`
INNER JOIN `t2` ON `t1`.`id` = `t2`.`id`;
Would get us only records that appear in both tables, like this:
1 Tim 1 Tim
Inner joins don't have a direction (like left or right) because they are explicitly bidirectional - we require a match on both sides.
Outer Joins
Outer joins, on the other hand, are for finding records that may not have a match in the other table. As such, you have to specify which side of the join is allowed to have a missing record.
LEFT JOIN and RIGHT JOIN are shorthand for LEFT OUTER JOIN and RIGHT OUTER JOIN; I will use their full names below to reinforce the concept of outer joins vs inner joins.
Left Outer Join
A left outer join, like this:
SELECT *
FROM `t1`
LEFT OUTER JOIN `t2` ON `t1`.`id` = `t2`.`id`;
...would get us all the records from the left table regardless of whether or not they have a match in the right table, like this:
1 Tim 1 Tim
2 Marta NULL NULL
Right Outer Join
A right outer join, like this:
SELECT *
FROM `t1`
RIGHT OUTER JOIN `t2` ON `t1`.`id` = `t2`.`id`;
...would get us all the records from the right table regardless of whether or not they have a match in the left table, like this:
1 Tim 1 Tim
NULL NULL 3 Katarina
Full Outer Join
A full outer join would give us all records from both tables, whether or not they have a match in the other table, with NULLs on both sides where there is no match. The result would look like this:
1 Tim 1 Tim
2 Marta NULL NULL
NULL NULL 3 Katarina
However, as Pablo Santa Cruz pointed out, MySQL doesn't support this. We can emulate it by doing a UNION of a left join and a right join, like this:
SELECT *
FROM `t1`
LEFT OUTER JOIN `t2` ON `t1`.`id` = `t2`.`id`
UNION
SELECT *
FROM `t1`
RIGHT OUTER JOIN `t2` ON `t1`.`id` = `t2`.`id`;
You can think of a UNION as meaning "run both of these queries, then stack the results on top of each other"; some of the rows will come from the first query and some from the second.
It should be noted that a UNION in MySQL will eliminate exact duplicates: Tim would appear in both of the queries here, but the result of the UNION only lists him once. My database guru colleague feels that this behavior should not be relied upon. So to be more explicit about it, we could add a WHERE clause to the second query:
SELECT *
FROM `t1`
LEFT OUTER JOIN `t2` ON `t1`.`id` = `t2`.`id`
UNION
SELECT *
FROM `t1`
RIGHT OUTER JOIN `t2` ON `t1`.`id` = `t2`.`id`
WHERE `t1`.`id` IS NULL;
On the other hand, if you wanted to see duplicates for some reason, you could use UNION ALL.
Using a union query will remove duplicates, and this is different than the behavior of full outer join that never removes any duplicate:
[Table: t1] [Table: t2]
value value
------- -------
1 1
2 2
4 2
4 5
This is the expected result of full outer join:
value | value
------+-------
1 | 1
2 | 2
2 | 2
Null | 5
4 | Null
4 | Null
This is the result of using left and right Join with union:
value | value
------+-------
Null | 5
1 | 1
2 | 2
4 | Null
[SQL Fiddle]
My suggested query is:
select
t1.value, t2.value
from t1
left outer join t2
on t1.value = t2.value
union all -- Using `union all` instead of `union`
select
t1.value, t2.value
from t2
left outer join t1
on t1.value = t2.value
where
t1.value IS NULL
Result of above query that is as same as expected result:
value | value
------+-------
1 | 1
2 | 2
2 | 2
4 | NULL
4 | NULL
NULL | 5
[SQL Fiddle]
@Steve Chambers: [From comments, with many thanks!]
Note: This may be the best solution, both for efficiency and for generating the same results as aFULL OUTER JOIN. This blog post also explains it well - to quote from Method 2: "This handles duplicate rows correctly and doesn’t include anything it shouldn’t. It’s necessary to useUNION ALLinstead of plainUNION, which would eliminate the duplicates I want to keep. This may be significantly more efficient on large result sets, since there’s no need to sort and remove duplicates."
I decided to add another solution that comes from full outer join visualization and math, it is not better that above but more readable:
Full outer join means
(t1 ∪ t2): all int1or int2
(t1 ∪ t2) = (t1 ∩ t2) + t1_only + t2_only: all in botht1andt2plus all int1that aren't int2and plus all int2that aren't int1:
-- (t1 ∩ t2): all in both t1 and t2
select t1.value, t2.value
from t1 join t2 on t1.value = t2.value
union all -- And plus
-- all in t1 that not exists in t2
select t1.value, null
from t1
where not exists( select 1 from t2 where t2.value = t1.value)
union all -- and plus
-- all in t2 that not exists in t1
select null, t2.value
from t2
where not exists( select 1 from t1 where t2.value = t1.value)
[SQL Fiddle]