True and correct.  I just put in the example code for the old style. I had actually noticed the execution plans were pretty much identical.

How people can still write in that scares me

A lot of it, unfortunately not all of it, comes from Oracle people. But even Oracle is starting down the path of eliminating the old style syntax. If you go out & search on the Oracle blogs & newsgroups, it's a big deal that lots of them are very unhappy about.

Hi,

This article & discussion is very interesting and it helped me a lot in understanding the Outer Join Query plus the old vs. new syntax.

Thanks once again

Regards

Amit Gurjar

To get the Execution plans to match between the old and new syntax, the "old style" join query needs to look something like this:

SELECT
S.IIATransactionId
,substring(rats_filename,1+patindex('%{________-____-____-____-____________}%',rats_filename),36) AS OracleTransactionId
FROM iiafeedtransaction S,
ratsiiafeedtransaction o
WHERE S.IIATransactionId *= substring(rats_filename,1+patindex('%{________-____-____-____-____________}%',rats_filename),36)
GROUP BY
S.IIATransactionId,substring(rats_filename,1+patindex('%{________-____-____-____-____________}%',rats_filename),36)
HAVING substring(rats_filename,1+patindex('%{________-____-____-____-____________}%',rats_filename),36) IS NULL
ORDER BY S.IIATransactionId

Using the GROUP BY and the HAVING clauses puts the filter back into the execution plan and the correct results are seen.

Far easier to just use the new style of joins

Regards,

Mark Horton.

Because you dont have control over the order of WHERE clause execution, the WHERE condition can occur before the JOIN condition, meaning that the WHERE occurs on the *Cartesian Product* of the two tables, and therefore doesnt filter rows properly.

If you think about this closely enough, it makes sense.

The use of the old-style syntax promoted the entire WHERE clause to the ON clause.  You get the same results as the "wrong" query if you used "LEFT JOIN ... ON S. = O. AND o.rats_filename IS NOT NULL".  The IS NOT NULL condition is being used as a a join condition instead of a filter condition and, since none of the fields are null, has no effect.

The only mystery to me is how Oracle differentiates join conditions and filter conditions.  Maybe only logical comparisons involving both tables are considered join conditions?

It simply returns the anticipated results, which is only those rows that don't match. Precisely how... you need to ask someone that understands Oracle. I think Scott Coleman's answers have been more precise than anything I'm going to offer up.

Itzik Ben-Gan wrote an article that explains this very clearly in SQL Magazine in the October 2004 issue. The InstantDoc ID is #43681.

The problem is that in Old Style Joins, you can't separate the join clause and the Where Clause so the result may include extraneous NULL values in your result set.

Here are two simple queries you can run in PUBS to see this:

-- Old Style Join
-- 13 Valid Entries, 6 Invalid Entries
select o.name, i.name,i.indid
from sysobjects o, sysindexes i
where o.id *= i.id and
o.type = 'S' and
i.indid = 1

-- New Style Join
-- 13 Valid Entries, 0 Invalid Entries
select o.name, i.name,i.indid
from sysobjects o
left outer join sysindexes i
on o.id = i.id
where o.type = 'S' and
i.indid = 1