If Inner Join can be thought of as Cross Join but filtering out the records satisfying the condition
- by Jian Lin
If an Inner Join can be thought of as a cross join and then getting the records that satisfy the condition, then a LEFT OUTER JOIN can be thought of as that, plus ONE record on the left table that doesn't satisfy the condition.
In other words, it is not a cross join that "goes easy" on the left records (even when the condition is not satisfied), because then the left record can appear many times (as many as how many records there are in the right table).
So the LEFT OUTER JOIN is the Cross JOIN with the records satisfying the condition, plus ONE record from the LEFT TABLE that doesn't satisfy the condition.