Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Of course.

You've got a list of countries and are pulling each country's national flower, national bird, largest port city etc.

Without outer joins, Liechtenstein with no ports doesn't show in the list at all. Sad news for people who want to know all countries, or Liechtenstein's national bird (eagle).




You’re not obliged to pull everything in one request. You can issue several requests.


Sure. You're also not obligated to include a WHERE-clause in the query you send to your database. You can do the filtering in the application.


What's your point? You can live without nulls, they're not required and you don't need to avoid WHERE-clause for that. It's a theoretical concept, nobody in sane mind would do that, but nulls are not required for relational algebra.


You started this subthread by asserting that one shouldn't use outer joins, and when other people pointed out valid use cases for outer joins, you advocated to use application logic to work around your refusal to use them.

My response was just to point out the absurdity of your premise.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: