I was reviewing some code for an Oracle colleague of mine the other day before it was released to the general public, and one of my comments was that I preferred to use the ANSI syntax for joins that came into the database with release 9i.

The original developer then asked what the point was, since the code was always doing a full join anyway.  One of the simple reasons that I like the ANSI syntax is because it is immediately obvious which parts of the WHERE clause are there to join tables together, and which parts are the “real” data selection criteria.

The place that I found best for explaining the syntax and what each means is the O’Reilly site here, which gives a great overview of what each type of join offers.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 22nd, 2008 at 8:19 pm and is filed under Oracle, Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.