For example, a Department may be associated with many different Employees. Joining two tables effectively combines information from both tables to avoid duplication of data in either table. Employees Table Departments Table In this example, employeeID is a primary key in the table called “Employees”. You’ll notice that employeeID also exists in the “Departments” table but as a foreign key. Using SQL Join, we can combine these two tables into one when presenting the results of a query. Design Example In this example, using an inner join, we can build a query to display the department name and employee name even though neither table has this information on its own. The two tables are joined by the ’employeeID’ field. We can use the INNER JOIN to bind this data together. Syntax Example List the departments and their assigned employees. Results You should immediately notice that ‘Operations’ from the Department table and ‘Fred White’ from the Employees table are not included in the results. This is because there is there are no employees assigned to Operations, and Fred White is not assigned to a valid department ID. If there are rows in “Departments” that do not have matches in “Employees” and vice versa, those rows will not be listed.
