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Explain the differences between inner, outer, left, and cross joins.

🟢 Easy Conceptual Fresher level
1Times asked
Apr 2026Last seen
Apr 2026First seen

💡 Model Answer

INNER JOIN returns only matching rows from both tables. LEFT JOIN (or LEFT OUTER JOIN) returns all rows from the left table and matching rows from the right; unmatched right rows are NULL. RIGHT JOIN does the opposite, returning all rows from the right table. FULL OUTER JOIN returns all rows from both tables, with NULLs where there is no match. CROSS JOIN returns the Cartesian product of the two tables, combining every row of the first with every row of the second. Each join type serves a different data retrieval need.

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