natural-join

Disclaimer: I'm a developer and not a DBA. I've been a huge fan of the USING clause in Oracle since I accidentally stumbled upon it and have used it in place of the old-fashioned ON clause to join fact tables with dimension tables ever since. To me, it creates a much more succinct SQL and produces a more concise result set with no unnecessary duplicated columns. However, I was asked yesterday by a colleague to convert all my USING clauses into ONs. I will check with him and ask him what his reasons are. He works much more closely with the database than I do, so I assume he has some good

CREATE TABLE subscription ( magazine_id bigint, user_id bigint, PRIMARY KEY (magazine_id, user_id) ) CREATE TABLE delivery ( magazine_id bigint, user_id bigint, FOREIGN KEY (subscription) REFERENCES subscription (magazine_id, user_id) ) What is a good way to query for deliveries given a particular subscription? Is there a way to assign a column name to PRIMARY KEY (magazine_id, user_id) and the corresponding foreign key so that I can query like this SELECT * FROM subscription JOIN delivery ON (delivery.subscription_fk = delivery.subscription_pk) Note: I can write something like this: SELECT *

I've been trying to understand the concept of sql joins fully, venn diagrams have helped me a lot to do that. I've found them for all kind of joins but not for natural joins. How would a venn diagram for a natural join look like? Venn diagrams are not very helpful for understanding natural join or inner join. Most Venn diagrams associated with joins on Stack Overflow are parroted worthless misrepresentations--even in cases where a Venn diagram could be useful. Here are some valid uses of Venn diagrams for SQL natural join: If you ignore column order, we can have an area be a set whose elements

I am reading about NATURAL shorthand form for SQL joins and I see some traps: it just takes automatically all same named column-pairs (use USING to specify explicit column list) if some new column is added, then join output can be "unexpectedly" changed too, which may be not so obvious (even if you know how NATURAL works) in complicated structures NATURAL JOIN syntax is anti-pattern: The purpose of the query is less obvious; the columns used by the application is not clear the columns used can change "unexpectedly" The syntax goes against the modularity rule , about using strict typing