I'm starting to feel bad here ...
Patrick Cahill (11/12/2013)
I agree that using WHERE NOT EXISTS is easier to read, the purpose of the article was to show how to get the results using the outer join. But I do agree that I could have shown other solutions and it would have made the article better.
I most certainly didn't want to downplay your explanation & examples; I (and obviously everyone else here) liked them a lot, but given the likely-hood someone might land on this page from a search for 'outer join & what's missing' I felt like a note about WHERE NOT EXISTS() was in order. (**)
(**: mostly because people often don't look further than the first thing 'that works'; worse, I've been having plenty of fights here at work about this exact subject where the argument often seems to be : but LEFT OUTER JOIN ... WHERE <field> IS NULL looks more technical so it HAS to be better... )
But I digress =) Like I said, thx for a fine article! I was merely trying to complement it.