If we have 3 accepted records and 4 sent records, and we perform an inner join between the sent and accepted tables, what will be the result?

An inner join returns only the rows that have matching values in both tables based on the join condition. If the join key is, for example, a common ID, the result set will contain one row for each pair of matching IDs. With 3 accepted records and 4 sent records, the maximum number of rows you could get is 3 if every accepted record matches a sent record, or 4 if every sent record matches an accepted record. If there are no matching keys, the result will be an empty set. In practice, the number of rows equals the count of distinct matching key pairs. For instance, if two sent records share the same accepted ID, you could get two rows for that ID. The key point is that inner join discards any rows that do not have a counterpart in the other table, so the result size is bounded by the smaller of the two tables but can be less if keys do not align.