90 Chapter 3: Selecting

Note: It is very common for a WHERE clause to accidentally eliminate rows in

an OUTER JOIN. Typically, a LEFT OUTER JOIN or RIGHT OUTER JOIN becomes
an INNER JOIN, or a FULL OUTER JOIN becomes a LEFT or RIGHT OUTER
JOIN. Heres the technical explanation for this symptom: Any null-intolerant
predicate that refers to attributes from a null-supplying table will eliminate
NULL-supplied rows from the result. A null-intolerant predicate is a predicate
that cannot evaluate to true if any of its inputs are NULL. Most SQL predicates,
such as comparisons, LIKE, or IN predicates, are null-intolerant. Examples of
null-tolerant predicates are IS NULL and any predicate p qualified by a
null-tolerant truth value test, such as p IS NOT TRUE. (from Semantics and
Compatibility of Transact-SQL Outer Joins by G. N. Paulley, 15 February 2002,
iAnywhere Solutions Technical White Paper, Document Number 1017447.)

3.6 Multi-Table Joins

The syntax of the FROM clause allows for joins among endless numbers of
tables, with or without parentheses to create nested table expressions, and with
or without ON conditions on each join. In most cases, parentheses are not
required, but it is a very good idea to provide an ON condition for every join
operator whenever possible.
<table_expression> ::= <table_term>
| <table_expression>
CROSS JOIN
<table_term>
| <table_expression>
[ <on_condition_shorthand> ] -- do not use
<join_operator>
<table_term>
[ <on_condition> ] -- use this instead
<table_term> ::= <table_reference>
| <view_reference>
| <derived_table>
| <procedure_reference>
| "(" <table_expression_list> ")"
| <lateral_derived_table>
<on_condition_shorthand> ::= KEY -- foreign key columns; do not use
| NATURAL -- like-named columns; do not use
<join_operator> ::= <inner_join>
| <left_outer_join>
| <right_outer_join>
| <full_outer_join>
In the absence of parentheses, join operators are evaluated from left to right.
That means the first pair of table terms are joined to create a virtual table, then
that virtual table is joined to the third table term to produce another virtual table,
and so on.
The following example shows a four-way join among tables that exist in the
ASADEMO database that ships with SQL Anywhere Studio 9. Here is the
schema for the four tables (customer, product, sales_order, and
sales_order_items) plus two other tables that will appear in later examples
(employee and fin_code):
CREATE TABLE customer (
id INTEGER NOT NULL DEFAULT AUTOINCREMENT,
fname CHAR ( 15 ) NOT NULL,
lname CHAR ( 20 ) NOT NULL,