ASA SQL User's Guide
Joins: Retrieving Data from Several Tables
A relational database stores information about different types of objects in different tables. For example, information particular to employees appears in one table, and information that pertains to departments in another. The employee table contains information such as employee names and addresses. The department table contains information about one department, such as the name of the department and who the department head is.
Most questions can only be answered using a combination of information from the various tables. For example, you may want to answer the question "Who manages the Sales department?" To find the name of this person, you must identify the correct person using information from the department table, then look up that person's name in the employee table.
Joins are a means of answering such questions by forming a new virtual table that includes information from multiple tables. For example, you could create a list of the department heads by combining the information contained in the employee table and the department table. You specify which tables contain the information you need using the FROM clause.
To make the join useful, you must combine the correct columns of each table. To list department heads, each row of the combined table should contain the name of a department and the name of the employee who manages it. You control how columns are matched in the composite table by either specifying a particular type of join operation or using the ON phrase.