CONTOH INNER JOIN 1 : INNER JOIN

Syntax:
SELECT { * | fieldlist } FROM table1
INNER JOIN table2 ON table1.field1 compoperator table2.field2
fieldlist
The list of fields that are to be retrieved from the table.
table1
The name of the first table from which information is to be retrieved.
table2
The name of the second table from which information is to be retrieved.
field1
The field from the first table that is being compared to field2 from the second table.
compoperator
A comparison operator such as =, >, <, etc.
field2
The field from the second table that is being compared to field1 from the first table.
The INNER JOIN operator can be used in any FROM clause to combine records from two
tables.
It is, in fact, the most common type of join. There must be a matching value in a field common to
both tables. An INNER JOIN cannot be nested inside a LEFT JOIN or RIGHT JOIN.

Examples
Code:
SELECT Employee.Username
FROM Employee INNER JOIN Project
ON Employee.EmployeeID = Project.EmployeeID
WHERE Employee.City = 'Boston'
AND Project.ProjectName = 'Hardwork';
Output:

Username
Jack Smith
Herman Allen
Jill Swafford
Bob Thornton
(4 row(s) affected)

Explanation:

The preceding example returns a list of all employees who live in Boston and who are working
on the Hardwork project.
Note: You can join any two numeric fields as long as they are of like type (such as AutoNumber
and Long). However, with non-numeric data, the fields must be of the same type and contain the
same kind of data, though they can have different names.
Language(s): MS SQL Server
Code:
SELECT Employee.Username, Project.ProjectName
FROM Employee INNER JOIN Project
ON Employee.EmployeeID = Project.EmployeeID;
Output:

Username

ProjectName

Jack Smith
Herman Allen
Jill Swafford
Bob Thornton
Mike Sosebee
Jill Swafford
Zack Womble

Hardwork
Hardwork
Hardwork
Hardwork
Grindstone
Grindstone
Hardwork

(7 row(s) affected)
Explanation:

With the INNER JOIN operator, any relational comparison operator can be used in the ON
clause: =, <, >, <=, >=, or <>. The above example returns all cases where the value in the
'EmployeeID' field of the 'Employee' table matches the 'EmployeeID' field of the 'Project' table
(i.e. it returns the names of those employees working on each of the projects).
Language(s): MS SQL Server
Code:
SELECT Employee.Username, Project.ProjectName
FROM Employee INNER JOIN Project
ON Employee.EmployeeID <> Project.EmployeeID;
Output:

Username

ProjectName

Jack Smith
Herman Allen
Bob Thornton
Mike Sosebee
Zack Womble

Grindstone
Grindstone
Grindstone
Hardwork
Grindstone

(5 row(s) affected)
Explanation:

This example returns all employees not working on each project.

Language(s): MS SQL Server
Code:
SELECT Employee.Username, Project.ProjectName, Project.Location
FROM Employee INNER JOIN Project
ON (Employee.EmployeeID = Project.EmployeeID)
AND (Employee.City = Project.Location);
Output:

Username

ProjectName

Location

Mike Sosebee
Jill Swafford
Zack Womble

Grindstone
Grindstone
Hardwork

Boston
Boston
Lexington

(3 row(s) affected)
Explanation:

You can also link several clauses in an INNER JOIN statement. The preceding example returns
all employees working on each project who live in the same city as where the project is taking
place.
Language(s): MS SQL Server
Code:
SELECT Songs.SongName, Singers.Name, Duos.DuoName
FROM Songs INNER JOIN (Singers INNER JOIN Duos
ON (Singers.Name = Duos.Member1)
OR (Singers.Name = Duos.Member2))
ON Songs.Musician = Singers.Name;

Output:

SongName

Name

DuoName

I Got You Babe

I Got You Babe
Baby Don't Go
Baby Don't Go
A Little Bit Country, A Little Bit Rock and Roll
A Little Bit Country, A Little Bit Rock and Roll
This Country's Rockin'
This Country's Rockin'
Love Letters in the Sand

Sonny Bono
Cher
Sonny Bono
Cher
Donnie Osmond
Marie Osmond
Wynonna Judd
Naomi Judd
Pat Boone

Sonny and Cher

Sonny and Cher
Sonny and Cher
Sonny and Cher
The Osmonds
The Osmonds
The Judds
The Judds
Pat and Shirley Boone

(9 row(s) affected)
Explanation:

It is also possible to nest statements as in this example which returns all songs recorded by
musicians who are members of duos.
Language(s): MS SQL Server
Code:
SELECT Songs.SongName, Singers.Name, Duos.DuoName
FROM Songs, Singers, Duos
WHERE ((Singers.Name = Duos.Member1)
OR (Singers.Name = Duos.Member2))
AND (Songs.Musician = Singers.Name);
Output:

SongName

Name

DuoName

I Got You Babe

I Got You Babe
Baby Don't Go
Baby Don't Go
A Little Bit Country, A Little Bit Rock and Roll
A Little Bit Country, A Little Bit Rock and Roll
This Country's Rockin'
This Country's Rockin'
Love Letters in the Sand

Sonny Bono
Cher
Sonny Bono
Cher
Donnie Osmond
Marie Osmond
Wynonna Judd
Naomi Judd
Pat Boone

Sonny and Cher

Sonny and Cher
Sonny and Cher
Sonny and Cher
The Osmonds
The Osmonds
The Judds
The Judds
Pat and Shirley Boone

(9 row(s) affected)

Explanation:

An inner join can also be achieved by using the WHERE clause. This query returns the same set
of records as the previous example.
Language(s): MS SQL Server

CONTOH INNER JOIN 2 : INNER JOIN

SQL Inner Join

As discussed in the previous lesson, you should use the SQL INNER JOIN when you only want
to return records where there is at least one row in both tables that match the join condition.
Example SQL statement
Code
SELECT * FROM Individual
INNER JOIN Publisher
ON Individual.IndividualId = Publi
WHERE Individual.IndividualId = '

Source Tables

Left Table
Id

FirstName

LastName

UserName

Fred

Flinstone

freddo

Homer

Simpson

homey

Homer

Brown

notsofamous

Ozzy

Ozzbourne

sabbath

Homer

Gain

noplacelike

Right Table
IndividualId

AccessLevel

Administrator

Contributor

Contributor

Contributor

10

Administrator

Result
IndividualId FirstName LastName UserName IndividualId AccessLevel
2

Homer

Simpson

homey

CONTOH INNER JOIN 3

Contributor

: Join (SQL)

An SQL join clause combines records from two or more tables in a database. It creates a set that
can be saved as a table or used as is. A JOIN is a means for combining fields from two tables by
using values common to each. ANSI standard SQL specifies four types of JOIN: INNER, OUTER,

LEFT,

and RIGHT. As a special case, a table (base table, view, or joined table) can JOIN to itself in
a self-join.
A programmer writes a JOIN predicate to identify the records for joining. If the evaluated
predicate is true, the combined record is then produced in the expected format, a record set or a
temporary table.
Sample tables

Relational databases are often normalized to eliminate duplication of information when objects
may have one-to-many relationships. For example, a Department may be associated with many
different Employees. Joining two tables effectively creates another table which combines
information from both tables. This is at some expense in terms of the time it takes to compute the
join. While it is also possible to simply maintain a denormalized table if speed is important,
duplicate information may take extra space, and add the expense and complexity of maintaining
data integrity if data which is duplicated later changes.
All subsequent explanations on join types in this article make use of the following two tables.
The rows in these tables serve to illustrate the effect of different types of joins and joinpredicates. In the following tables the DepartmentID column of the Department table (which
can be designated as Department.DepartmentID) is the primary key, while
Employee.DepartmentID is a foreign key.
Employee table
LastName

DepartmentID

Rafferty

31

Jones

33

Steinberg

33

Robinson

34

Smith

34

John

NULL

Department table
DepartmentID

DepartmentName

31

Sales

33

Engineering

34

Clerical

35

Marketing

Note: In the Employee table above, the employee "John" has not been assigned to any
department yet. Also, note that no employees are assigned to the "Marketing" department.
This is the SQL to create the aforementioned tables.
CREATE TABLE department
(
DepartmentID INT,
DepartmentName VARCHAR(20)
);
CREATE TABLE employee
(
LastName VARCHAR(20),
DepartmentID INT
);
INSERT INTO department(DepartmentID,
INSERT INTO department(DepartmentID,
'Engineering');
INSERT INTO department(DepartmentID,
INSERT INTO department(DepartmentID,
INSERT
INSERT
INSERT
INSERT
INSERT
INSERT

INTO
INTO
INTO
INTO
INTO
INTO

Inner join

employee(LastName,
employee(LastName,
employee(LastName,
employee(LastName,
employee(LastName,
employee(LastName,

DepartmentName) VALUES(31, 'Sales');

DepartmentName) VALUES(33,
DepartmentName) VALUES(34, 'Clerical');
DepartmentName) VALUES(35, 'Marketing');

DepartmentID)
DepartmentID)
DepartmentID)
DepartmentID)
DepartmentID)
DepartmentID)

VALUES('Rafferty', 31);
VALUES('Jones', 33);
VALUES('Steinberg', 33);
VALUES('Robinson', 34);
VALUES('Smith', 34);
VALUES('John', NULL);

An inner join is the most common join operation used in applications and can be regarded as the
default join-type. Inner join creates a new result table by combining column values of two tables
(A and B) based upon the join-predicate. The query compares each row of A with each row of B
to find all pairs of rows which satisfy the join-predicate. When the join-predicate is satisfied,
column values for each matched pair of rows of A and B are combined into a result row. The
result of the join can be defined as the outcome of first taking the Cartesian product (or Cross
join) of all records in the tables (combining every record in table A with every record in table B)
then return all records which satisfy the join predicate. Actual SQL implementations normally
use other approaches like a hash join or a sort-merge join where possible, since computing the
Cartesian product is very inefficient.

SQL specifies two different syntactical ways to express joins: "explicit join notation" and
"implicit join notation".
The "explicit join notation" uses the JOIN keyword to specify the table to join, and the ON
keyword to specify the predicates for the join, as in the following example:
SELECT *
FROM employee
INNER JOIN department ON employee.DepartmentID = department.DepartmentID;
The "implicit join notation" simply lists the tables for joining, in the FROM clause of the SELECT

statement, using commas to separate them. Thus it specifies a cross join, and the WHERE clause
may apply additional filter-predicates (which function comparably to the join-predicates in the
explicit notation).
The following example is equivalent to the previous one, but this time using implicit join
notation:
SELECT *
FROM employee, department
WHERE employee.DepartmentID = department.DepartmentID;

The queries given in the examples above will join the Employee and Department tables using the
DepartmentID column of both tables. Where the DepartmentID of these tables match (i.e. the
join-predicate is satisfied), the query will combine the LastName, DepartmentID and
DepartmentName columns from the two tables into a result row. Where the DepartmentID does
not match, no result row is generated.
Thus the result of the execution of either of the two queries above will be:
Employee.Last Employee.Depart Department.Departm Department.Depart
Name
mentID
entName
mentID
Robinson

34

Clerical

34

Jones

33

Engineering

33

Smith

34

Clerical

34

Steinberg

33

Engineering

33

Rafferty

31

Sales

31

Note: Programmers should take special care when joining tables on columns that can contain
NULL values, since NULL will never match any other value (not even NULL itself), unless the
join condition explicitly uses the IS NULL or IS NOT NULL predicates.

Notice that the employee "John" and the department "Marketing" do not appear in the query
execution results. Neither of these has any matching records in the other respective table: "John"
has no associated department, and no employee has the department ID 35 ("Marketing").
Depending on the desired results, this behavior may be a subtle bug, which can be avoided with
an outer join.
One can further classify inner joins as equi-joins, as natural joins, or as cross-joins.
Equi-join

An equi-join is a specific type of comparator-based join, that uses only equality comparisons in
the join-predicate. Using other comparison operators (such as <) disqualifies a join as an equijoin. The query shown above has already provided an example of an equi-join:
SELECT *
FROM employee
JOIN department ON employee.DepartmentID = department.DepartmentID;

We can write equi-join as below,

SELECT * FROM employee, department WHERE employee.DepartmentID =
department.DepartmentID;

If columns in an equijoin have the same name, SQL/92 provides an optional shorthand notation
for expressing equi-joins, by way of the USING construct[1]:
SELECT *
FROM employee
INNER JOIN department USING (DepartmentID);
The USING construct is more than mere syntactic sugar,

however, since the result set differs from

the result set of the version with the explicit predicate. Specifically, any columns mentioned in
the USING list will appear only once, with an unqualified name, rather than once for each table in
the join. In the above case, there will be a single DepartmentID column and no
employee.DepartmentID or department.DepartmentID.
The USING clause is not supported by SQL Server and Sybase.
Natural join

A natural join is a type of equi-join where the join predicate arises implicitly by comparing all
columns in both tables that have the same column-names in the joined tables. The resulting
joined table contains only one column for each pair of equally named columns.
Most experts agree that NATURAL JOINs are dangerous and therefore strongly discourage their
use.[2] The danger comes from inadvertently adding a new column, named the same as another
column in the other table. An existing natural join might then "naturally" use the new column for
comparisons, making comparisons/matches using different criteria (from different columns) than

before. Thus an existing query could produce different results, even though the data in the tables
have not been changed, but only augmented.
The above sample query for inner joins can be expressed as a natural join in the following way:
SELECT *
FROM employee
NATURAL JOIN department;
As with the explicit USING clause,

only one DepartmentID column occurs in the joined table,

with no qualifier:
DepartmentID

Employee.LastName

Department.DepartmentName

34

Smith

Clerical

33

Jones

Engineering

34

Robinson

Clerical

33

Steinberg

Engineering

31

Rafferty

Sales

PostgreSQL, MySQL and Oracle support natural joins, but not Microsoft T-SQL or IBM DB2.
The columns used in the join are implicit so the join code does not show which columns are
expected, and a change in column names may change the results. An INNER JOIN performed on
2 tables having the same field name has the same effect.[3]
Cross join

CROSS JOIN returns the Cartesian product of rows from tables in the join. In other words, it will
produce rows which combine each row from the first table with each row from the second table.
[4]

Example of an explicit cross join:

SELECT *
FROM employee
CROSS JOIN department;

Example of an implicit cross join:

SELECT *
FROM employee, department;

Employee.Last Employee.Depart Department.Departm Department.Depart

Name
mentID
entName
mentID
Rafferty

31

Sales

31

Jones

33

Sales

31

Steinberg

33

Sales

31

Smith

34

Sales

31

Robinson

34

Sales

31

John

NULL

Sales

31

Rafferty

31

Engineering

33

Jones

33

Engineering

33

Steinberg

33

Engineering

33

Smith

34

Engineering

33

Robinson

34

Engineering

33

John

NULL

Engineering

33

Rafferty

31

Clerical

34

Jones

33

Clerical

34

Steinberg

33

Clerical

34

Smith

34

Clerical

34

Robinson

34

Clerical

34

John

NULL

Clerical

34

Rafferty

31

Marketing

35

Jones

33

Marketing

35

Steinberg

33

Marketing

35

Smith

34

Marketing

35

Robinson

34

Marketing

35

John

NULL

Marketing

35

The cross join does not apply any predicate to filter records from the joined table. Programmers
can further filter the results of a cross join by using a WHERE clause.
Outer joins

An outer join does not require each record in the two joined tables to have a matching record.
The joined table retains each recordeven if no other matching record exists. Outer joins
subdivide further into left outer joins, right outer joins, and full outer joins, depending on which
table's rows are retained (left, right, or both).
(In this case left and right refer to the two sides of the JOIN keyword.)
No implicit join-notation for outer joins exists in standard SQL.
Left outer join

The result of a left outer join (or simply left join) for table A and B always contains all records of
the "left" table (A), even if the join-condition does not find any matching record in the "right"
table (B). This means that if the ON clause matches 0 (zero) records in B (for a given record in A),
the join will still return a row in the result (for that record)but with NULL in each column
from B. A left outer join returns all the values from an inner join plus all values in the left table
that do not match to the right table. From Oracle 9i onwards the LEFT OUTER JOIN statement
can be used as well as Oracle's older (+) syntax.[5]
For example, this allows us to find an employee's department, but still shows the employee(s)
even when they have not been assigned to a department (contrary to the inner-join example
above, where unassigned employees were excluded from the result).
Example of a left outer join, with the additional result row (compared with the inner join)
italicized:
SELECT *
FROM employee
LEFT OUTER JOIN department ON employee.DepartmentID = department.DepartmentID;

Employee.Last Employee.Depart Department.Departm Department.Depart

Name
mentID
entName
mentID
Jones

33

Engineering

33

Rafferty

31

Sales

31

Robinson

34

Clerical

34

Smith

34

Clerical

34

John

NULL

NULL

NULL

Steinberg

33

Engineering

33

Oracle supports the alternate syntax:

SELECT * FROM employee, department WHERE employee.DepartmentID =

department.DepartmentID(+)

Sybase supports the alternate syntax:

SELECT * FROM employee, department WHERE employee.DepartmentID *=
department.DepartmentID

Right outer join

A right outer join (or right join) closely resembles a left outer join, except with the treatment of
the tables reversed. Every row from the "right" table (B) will appear in the joined table at least
once. If no matching row from the "left" table (A) exists, NULL will appear in columns from A
for those records that have no match in B.
A right outer join returns all the values from the right table and matched values from the left
table (NULL in case of no matching join predicate). For example, this allows us to find each
employee and his or her department, but still show departments that have no employees.
Below is an example of a right outer join, with the additional result row italicized:
SELECT *
FROM employee
RIGHT OUTER JOIN department ON employee.DepartmentID =
department.DepartmentID;

Employee.Last Employee.Depart Department.Departm Department.Depart

Name
mentID
entName
mentID
Smith

34

Clerical

34

Jones

33

Engineering

33

Robinson

34

Clerical

34

Steinberg

33

Engineering

33

Rafferty

31

Sales

31

NULL

NULL

Marketing

35

Oracle supports the alternate syntax:

SELECT * FROM employee, department WHERE employee.DepartmentID(+) =
department.DepartmentID

Right and left outer joins are functionally equivalent. Neither provides any functionality that the
other does not, so right and left outer joins may replace each other as long as the table order is
switched.

Full outer join

Conceptually, a full outer join combines the effect of applying both left and right outer joins.
Where records in the FULL OUTER JOINed tables do not match, the result set will have NULL
values for every column of the table that lacks a matching row. For those records that do match, a
single row will be produced in the result set (containing fields populated from both tables).
For example, this allows us to see each employee who is in a department and each department
that has an employee, but also see each employee who is not part of a department and each
department which doesn't have an employee.
Example full outer join:
SELECT *
FROM employee
FULL OUTER JOIN department ON employee.DepartmentID = department.DepartmentID;

Employee.Last Employee.Depart Department.Departm Department.Depart

Name
mentID
entName
mentID
Smith

34

Clerical

34

Jones

33

Engineering

33

Robinson

34

Clerical

34

John

NULL

NULL

NULL

Steinberg

33

Engineering

33

Rafferty

31

Sales

31

NULL

NULL

Marketing

35

Some database systems do not support the full outer join functionality directly, but they can
emulate it through the use of an inner join and UNION ALL selects of the "single table rows"
from left and right tables respectively. The same example can appear as follows:
SELECT employee.LastName, employee.DepartmentID, department.DepartmentName,
department.DepartmentID
FROM employee
INNER JOIN department ON employee.DepartmentID = department.DepartmentID
UNION ALL
SELECT employee.LastName, employee.DepartmentID, CAST(NULL AS VARCHAR(20)),
CAST(NULL AS INTEGER)
FROM employee
WHERE NOT EXISTS (SELECT * FROM department WHERE employee.DepartmentID =
department.DepartmentID)
UNION ALL

SELECT CAST(NULL AS VARCHAR(20)), CAST(NULL AS INTEGER),

department.DepartmentName, department.DepartmentID
FROM department
WHERE NOT EXISTS (SELECT * FROM employee WHERE employee.DepartmentID =
department.DepartmentID)

Self-join

A self-join is joining a table to itself.[6]

Example

A query to find all pairings of two employees in the same country is desired. If there were two
separate tables for employees and a query which requested employees in the first table having
the same country as employees in the second table, a normal join operation could be used to find
the answer table. However, all the employee information is contained within a single large table.
[7]

Consider a modified Employee table such as the following:

Employee Table
EmployeeID

LastName

Country

DepartmentID

123

Rafferty

Australia

31

124

Jones

Australia

33

145

Steinberg

Australia

33

201

Robinson

United States

34

305

Smith

Germany

34

306

John

Germany

NULL

An example solution query could be as follows:

SELECT F.EmployeeID, F.LastName, S.EmployeeID, S.LastName, F.Country
FROM Employee F
INNER JOIN Employee S ON F.Country = S.Country
WHERE F.EmployeeID < S.EmployeeID
ORDER BY F.EmployeeID, S.EmployeeID;

Which results in the following table being generated.

Employee Table after Self-join by Country

EmployeeID

LastName

EmployeeID

LastName

Country

123

Rafferty

124

Jones

Australia

123

Rafferty

145

Steinberg

Australia

124

Jones

145

Steinberg

Australia

305

Smith

306

John

Germany

For this example:

F and S are aliases for the first and second copies of the employee table.

The condition F.Country = S.Country excludes pairings between employees in

different countries. The example question only wanted pairs of employees in
the same country.

The condition F.EmployeeID < S.EmployeeID excludes pairings where the

EmployeeID of the first employee is greater than or equal to the EmployeeID of
the second employee. In other words, the effect of this condition is to exclude
duplicate pairings and self-pairings. Without it, the following less useful table
would be generated (the table below displays only the "Germany" portion of
the result):

EmployeeID

LastName

EmployeeID

LastName

Country

305

Smith

305

Smith

Germany

305

Smith

306

John

Germany

306

John

305

Smith

Germany

306

John

306

John

Germany

Only one of the two middle pairings is needed to satisfy the original question, and the topmost
and bottommost are of no interest at all in this example.
Merge rows

To be able to do a select so as to merge multiple rows into 1 row : "group_concat notation".

MySQL and CUBRID use the group_concat keyword to achieve that goal, and PostgreSQL 9.0
has the string_agg function. Versions before 9.0 required the use of something like
array_to_string(array_agg(value),', ')

or the creation of an aggregate function.

Using the Employee Table:
LastName

DepartmentID

Rafferty

31

Jones

33

Steinberg

33

Robinson

34

Smith

34

John

NULL

to achieve the following results Table

DepartmentID

LastNames

NULL

John

31

Rafferty

33

Jones, Steinberg

34

Robinson, Smith

MySQL
SELECT DepartmentID, group_concat(LastName) AS LastNames
FROM employee
GROUP BY DepartmentID;

Oracle 11g R2
SELECT DepartmentID,
listagg(LastName, ', ') WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY LastName) AS LastNames
FROM employee
GROUP BY DepartmentID;

CUBRID
SELECT DepartmentID, GROUP_CONCAT(LastName ORDER BY LastName SEPARATOR ',') AS
LastNames
FROM employee
GROUP BY DepartmentID;

PostgreSQL
This section may stray from the topic of the article. Please help improve
this section or discuss this issue on the talk page. (May 2012)

First the function _group_concat and aggregate group_concat need to be created before that
query can be possible.
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION _group_concat(text, text)
RETURNS text AS $$
SELECT CASE
WHEN $2 IS NULL THEN $1
WHEN $1 IS NULL THEN $2
ELSE $1 operator(pg_catalog.||) ', ' operator(pg_catalog.||) $2
END
$$ IMMUTABLE LANGUAGE SQL;
error// JOIN SQL
CREATE AGGREGATE group_concat (
BASETYPE = text,
SFUNC = _group_concat,
STYPE = text
);
SELECT DepartmentID, group_concat(LastName) AS LastNames
FROM employee
GROUP BY DepartmentID;

As for version 9.0:

SELECT DepartmentID, string_agg(LastName, ', ') AS LastNames
FROM employee
GROUP BY DepartmentID;

Microsoft T-SQL
This section may stray from the topic of the article. Please help improve
this section or discuss this issue on the talk page. (May 2012)

For versions prior to Microsoft SQL Server 2005, the function group_concat must be created as a
user-defined aggregate function before that query can be possible, shown here in C#.
using
using
using
using
using

System;
System.Collections.Generic;
System.Data.SqlTypes;
System.IO;
Microsoft.SqlServer.Server;

[Serializable]
[SqlUserDefinedAggregate(Format.UserDefined, MaxByteSize=8000)]
public struct group_concat : IBinarySerialize{
private List values;
public void Init() {
this.values = new List();

}
public void Accumulate(SqlString value) {
this.values.Add(value.Value);
}
public void Merge(strconcat value) {
this.values.AddRange(value.values.ToArray());
}
public SqlString Terminate() {
return new SqlString(string.Join(", ", this.values.ToArray()));
}
public void Read(BinaryReader r) {
int itemCount = r.ReadInt32();
this.values = new List(itemCount);
for (int i = 0; i < itemCount; i++) {
this.values.Add(r.ReadString());
}
}
public void Write(BinaryWriter w) {
w.Write(this.values.Count);
foreach (string s in this.values) {
w.Write(s);
}
}
}

Then you can use the following query:

SELECT DepartmentID, dbo.group_concat(LastName) AS LastNames
FROM employee
GROUP BY DepartmentID;

From version 2005, one can accomplish this task using FOR XML PATH:
SELECT DepartmentID,
STUFF(
(SELECT
',' + LastName
FROM (
SELECT LastName
FROM employee e2
WHERE e1.DepartmentID=e2.DepartmentID OR
(e1.DepartmentID IS NULL AND e2.DepartmentID IS NULL)
) t1
ORDER BY LastName
FOR XML PATH('')
)
,1,1, ''
) AS LastNames
FROM employee e1
GROUP BY DepartmentID

Alternatives

The effect of an outer join can also be obtained using a UNION ALL between an INNER JOIN
and a SELECT of the rows in the "main" table that do not fulfill the join condition. For example
SELECT employee.LastName, employee.DepartmentID, department.DepartmentName
FROM employee
LEFT OUTER JOIN department ON employee.DepartmentID = department.DepartmentID;

can also be written as

SELECT employee.LastName, employee.DepartmentID, department.DepartmentName
FROM employee
INNER JOIN department ON employee.DepartmentID = department.DepartmentID
UNION ALL
SELECT employee.LastName, employee.DepartmentID, CAST(NULL AS VARCHAR(20))
FROM employee
WHERE NOT EXISTS (SELECT * FROM department WHERE employee.DepartmentID =
department.DepartmentID)

Implementation

Much work in database-systems has aimed at efficient implementation of joins, because

relational systems commonly call for joins, yet face difficulties in optimising their efficient
execution. The problem arises because inner joins operate both commutatively and associatively.
In practice, this means that the user merely supplies the list of tables for joining and the join
conditions to use, and the database system has the task of determining the most efficient way to
perform the operation. A query optimizer determines how to execute a query containing joins. A
query optimizer has two basic freedoms:
1. Join order: Because it joins functions commutatively and associatively, the
order in which the system joins tables does not change the final result-set of
the query. However, join-order could have an enormous impact on the cost of
the join operation, so choosing the best join order becomes very important.
2. Join method: Given two tables and a join condition, multiple algorithms can
produce the result-set of the join. Which algorithm runs most efficiently
depends on the sizes of the input tables, the number of rows from each table
that match the join condition, and the operations required by the rest of the
query.

Many join-algorithms treat their inputs differently. One can refer to the inputs to a join as the
"outer" and "inner" join operands, or "left" and "right", respectively. In the case of nested loops,
for example, the database system will scan the entire inner relation for each row of the outer
relation.
One can classify query-plans involving joins as follows:[8]

left-deep
using a base table (rather than another join) as the inner operand of each join
in the plan
right-deep
using a base table as the outer operand of each join in the plan
bushy
neither left-deep nor right-deep; both inputs to a join may themselves result
from joins

These names derive from the appearance of the query plan if drawn as a tree, with the outer join
relation on the left and the inner relation on the right (as convention dictates).
Join algorithms

Three fundamental algorithms for performing a join operation are known: Nested loop join, Sortmerge join and Hash join.
Join Indexes

Join indexes are database indexes that facilitate the processing of join queries in data
warehouses: they are currently (2012) available in implementations by Oracle[9] and Teradata.[10]
In the Teradata implementation, specified columns, aggregate functions on columns, or
components of date columns from one or more tables are specified using a syntax similar to the
definition of a database view: up to 64 columns/column expressions can be specified in a single
join index. Optionally, a column that defines the primary key of the composite data may also be
specified: on parallel hardware, the column values are used to partition the index's contents
across multiple disks. When the source tables are updated interactively by users, the contents of
the join index are automatically updated. Any query whose WHERE clause specifies any
combination of columns or column expressions that are an exact subset of those defined in a join
index (a so-called "covering query" will cause the join index, rather than the original tables and
their indexes, to be consulted during query execution.
The Oracle implementation limits itself to using bitmap indexes. A bitmap join index is used for
low-cardinality columns (i.e., columns containing less than 300 distinct values, according to the
Oracle documentation): it combines low-cardinality columns from multiple related tables. The
example Oracle uses is that of an inventory system, where different suppliers provide different
parts. The schema has three linked tables: two "master tables", Part and Supplier, and a "detail
table", Inventory. The last is a many-to-many table linking Supplier to Part, and contains the
most rows. Every part has a Part Type, and every supplier is based in the USA, and has a State
column. There are not more than 60 states+territories in the USA, and not more than 300 Part

Types. The bitmap join index is defined using a standard three-table join on the above three
tables, and specifying the Part_Type and Supplier_State columns for the index. However, it is
defined on the Inventory table, even though the columns Part_Type and Supplier_State are
"borrowed" from Supplier and Part respectively.
As for Teradata, an Oracle bitmap join index is only utilized to answer a query when the query's
WHERE clause specifies columns limited to those that are included in the join inde