It’s not unreasonable to expect these two statements to produce the same execution plan on most RDBMS, given that they’re logically equivalent. Since we’ve grown used to reading things from left to right and top to bottom, I don’t think
RIGHT JOINwill become more popular any time soon.There is, however, one place in the SQL language where
RIGHT JOINis surprisingly ubiquitous!
Read on to see how the MERGE operator includes as part of its operations the equivalent of a RIGHT OUTER JOIN. MERGE in SQL Server had justifiably built a bad reputation in its early years, but it’s surprisingly okay nowadays, with most of the bugs being fixed over time.