Antw: RE: join if there, blank if not

Henry Lafleur wrote:

> ...
> What I have always had trouble with, though, is if you have multiple fields
> for a primary key. For example, if a customer master table also had ship-to
> locations as the key and you wanted to get all customers and any orders for
> that customer, in rough ANSI SQL it would be:
>
> SELECT c.cust_number, c.ship_to, o.item
> FROM cust c LEFT OUTER JOIN orders o ON c.cust_number = o.cust_number AND
> c.ship_to = o.ship_to
>
> then, in the union, it is not clear how to do it:
>
> SELECT c.cust_number, c.ship_to, o.item
> FROM cust c, orders o
> WHERE c.cust_number = o.cust_number AND c.ship_to = o.ship_to
> UNION
> SELECT cust_number, ship_to, NULL AS item
> FROM cust
> WHERE ???
> ...

I don't see any problems with multiple fields. See the following example:

Outer join:
SELECT tab_a.k1, tab_a.k2, tab_a.a_txt, tab_b.b_txt
FROM tab_a LEFT JOIN tab_b ON (tab_a.k2 = tab_b.k2) AND (tab_a.k1 = tab_b.k1);

Simulated outer join:
SELECT tab_a.k1, tab_a.k2, tab_a.a_txt, tab_b.b_txt
FROM tab_a , tab_b WHERE (tab_a.k2 = tab_b.k2) AND (tab_a.k1 = tab_b.k1)
UNION
SELECT tab_a.k1, tab_a.k2, tab_a.a_txt, NULL
FROM tab_a WHERE (tab_a.k1 NOT IN (SELECT tab_b.k1 FROM tab_b))
OR (tab_a.k2 NOT IN (SELECT tab_b.k2 FROM tab_b));

Gerhard