Christian,

I apologize for the confusion and perhaps the asides that you have referred to in your post. I sincerely hope my explanation here will address some of the issues raised and also puts the article in a better perspective. I have thought long and hard about publishing this article not because the content is not unworthy of it but the format and the intent of the article.

I don't publish articles very lightly. I have published over 20 articles at O'Reilly some fairly involved and some geared towards understanding a certain aspect of a programming language. In addition I have worked with Oracle, SQLServer, Microsoft Access, and SQLServer over the years, mostly from an application programmer (Java, C++, C#) perspective.

The article that was presented here is based on various things that I had to learn outside of what the standard books on SQL teaches. I want to go beyond the basics and point out some of the patterns I have found in using Joins. I have not put as much emphasis in a COMPLETE treatment of any given subject such as the ANSI syntax nor the OPTIMIZATION but more on the ability of patternizing JOINs to retrieve a sensible collection results from databases.

I wanted to document the results that I have found for myself and my coprogrammers that have to deal with databases on and off.

I have also debated about the name of the article. One name I have tossed around was "Notes of Java Programmer on SQL Joins". One of my thoughts when I have published the article was that each of the principles will be a starting point for programmers to further delve into the details and come up with conclusions and further notes.

Finally I hoped the article to be mainly a source of IDEAS to further explore what is possible with SQL when used as a supporting asset of a procedural/oo languages.

Some of the readers have pointed out some errors in the SQL. I apologize for these errors. I did have the article reviewed by a couple of DBAs. Sorry that these have slipped through.

Also importantly thank you for your emphasis and alert on the ANSI 92 SQL along with a fine reference to the joins article on O'Reilly.

Author: Satya Komatineni