Question

I have noticed a few times when working on legacy code, that you can do left and right outer joins in sql by using the

=* 

as kind of shorthand for ‘right outer join’ and

*= 

as kind of shorthand for ‘left outer join’ in statements like this:

select table1.firstname, table2.lastname from table1, table2 where table1.id *= table2.id 

I would guess that there are other operators like these two for the different kinds of joins, but i have not been able to find any good complete documentation about it. So do you know any good links to documentation?

I personaly think that the SQL statements i have seen using these operators are more difficult to figure out than when using the spelled out syntax, so is there any benefits using the shorthand version?

Answer 1

The =* and *= are not complaint with current SQL standards, I believe these operators will be deprecated soon you should always use the standard join syntax. The other operators that you mention are confusing and need to go away, I cringe when I see these in database objects.