SQL RIGHT JOIN

The SQL Right Join is a Join used to return all the records (or rows) present in the Right table and matching rows from the Left table.

NOTE: All the Unmatched rows from the Left table will be filled with NULL Values.

SQL RIGHT JOIN Syntax

The basic syntax of the Right Join in SQL Server is as follows:

TIP: In SQL Server, Right Outer join can also be called as Right Join so it is optional to use the Outer Keyword.

Let us see the visual representation of the Right Outer join for better understanding.

From the above image you can understand easily that, Right Outer join displays all the records present in Table 2 and matching records from Table 1

In this article we will show you, How to write Right Join in SQL Server. For this, We are going to use two tables (Employee and Department) present in our [SQL Server Tutorials] Database.

Data present in the Employee Table is:

Data present in the Department Table is:

SQL Right Join – Selecting All Columns

The following SQL Query will display all the columns present in the Department table, and matching records from Employees table

OUTPUT

SQL Right Join – Avoid Outer keyword

As we said before, it is optional to use Outer keyword. Let me remove Outer keyword, and work will RIGHT JOIN

OUTPUT

If you observe the above screenshot, Although we have 15 records in Employee table, Right join is displaying 13 records. This is because,

• Department Id for 14th and 15th records in Employee table are NULLS so there is no matching records in right table.
• If you observe the 8th and 9th records, they are displaying NULL values. Because in Employee table there are no matching records for Department Id 3, 4 (Module Lead and Team Lead) in the Department table. So they are simply replaced by NULLS.

NOTE: The [Department ID] column is repeated twice, which is annoying to the user. By selecting individual column names we can avoid unwanted columns so, Please avoid SELECT * Statements in Right Join

SQL Right Join – Selecting Few Columns

Please place the required columns after the SQL SELECT Statement to avoid unwanted columns

OUTPUT

Above query will perfectly work as long as the column names from both tables (Employee and Department) are different like above. What happens if we have same Column names in both the tables? Well, you will end up in a mess. Let us see how to resolve the issue.

Before we get into the solution, let me show you one practical example. As you can see, we are using the above query but we added id from department table as an additional column.

You can see from the below screenshot, it is throwing an error : Ambiguous column name id. This is because, id column is present in both Employee, and department table. And SQL Server don’t know which column you are asking it to retrieve.

To resolve these kind of issues you always have to use table name before the column name. The following query is using ALIAS table name before the column names. By this approach, we can inform the SQL Server, that we are looking for id column belonging to department table.

We can simply write the above query as:

OUTPUT

SQL Right Join – Use Where Clause

The SQL Server also allows us to use Where Clause to restrict the number of rows returned by the right Join. In this example, we will use that WHERE Clause along with the Right Outer Join.

OUTPUT

SQL Right Join – Order By Clause

The SQL Server allows us to use Order By Clause in Right Join to rearrange the order of the records.

SQL CODE

OUTPUT

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