RE: Outer Joins are Evil?

From: Riyaj Shamsudeen <rshamsud_at_jcpenney.com>
Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2004 11:07:48 -0500
Message-id: <003b01c48f74$a8f65230$212f200a@rshamsudxp>

Well said, Karen!
I am dealing with few views that have multiple 'union all' branches with 'not in' clauses all around the code. I didn't quite understand the business logic behind these various branches and so talked to the developers, understood their sole reasoning: outerjoin is evil. They have written these complicated views just to avoid outerjoins!!!. Aaargh..

I have converted two of them already to use outerjoins and the optimizer is doing excellent job pushing the predicates correctly and optimizing them efficiently.

Thanks
Riyaj "Re-yas" Shamsudeen
Certified Oracle DBA

-----Original Message-----

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Karen Morton Sent: Tuesday, August 31, 2004 10:54 AM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: RE: Outer Joins are Evil?

Sounds like excuses...not reasons. What evidence do they provide to support their conclusion that outer joins are bad? It looks a bit like an attempt to disguise a fear of doing full table scans or something like that.

Outer joins, like pretty much everything else, are not "inherently evil". They are another option/tool to be used appropriately when and where needed. While I don't disagree with using default values in FK columns and the like, doing it only with the justification of avoiding outer joins is a bit near-sighted. Eliminating any one thing out of fear of what "it" may do seems to me to be more a fear of poorly written code as a result of misusing the feature. If it's really the fear of bad code, then teach people how to properly use the tool and do not take the tool out of the box entirely instead.

Karen Morton
Hotsos Enterprises, Ltd.
http://www.hotsos.com
Upcoming events at http://www.hotsos.com/education/schedule.html

-----Original Message-----

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Barr, Stephen Sent: Tuesday, August 31, 2004 8:04 AM
To: Oracle-L_at_freelists.org
Subject: Outer Joins are Evil?

I'm currently working on a datawarehouse project (~5 Tb) where the decision has been made to avoid performing outer joins.

The reasons given for this seem to be -

Simplifies user navigation of the structures - i.e. avoids outer joins.
Outer joins are slow and should be avoided at all costs.
If an FK is missing it is populated with a default value which will relate to an actual row in the target table, hence no rows will ever be dropped - again, supposedly this is to simply SQL and avoid outer joins.

What they actually do is populate each table in the structure with three default rows with an SK of 0, 1 & 2. Any FK's which are missing, not applicable or invalid will point to one of these rows.

Now....my question is....what is so inherently evil about outer joins that we go to this extreme to avoid them?

AND...has anyone else seen something like this deployed in other places?

Thanks,

Steve.

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Received on Tue Aug 31 2004 - 11:04:15 CDT