Top SQL Join Interview Questions and

Answers
Last updated on June 25, 2021

SQL Joins are one of the most commonly used concepts while working with
multiple tables. For this reason, interview questions based on SQL joins are
frequently asked during the interviews involving SQL.

In this article, we have compiled top SQL joins interview questions (starting with
the basic ones) that you should prepare for the interviews. So let’s begin.

SQL Joins Interview Questions

Ques.1. What are Joins in SQL?
Ans. Joins in SQL are the statements or clauses using which we can combine
two or more tables, based on some common fields present among the tables.

A simple example can be combining the two tables – EmployeeDetails and

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 EmployeeSalary. Now, we may look to join these two tables in order to get
useful information like fetching the name of the employee getting the highest
salary. Since the name is present in the EmployeeDetails table and salary is
present in EmployeeSalary, so, we will join these two tables using joins.

EmpId Name ManagerId

121 John 321

321 Walter 986

421 Nick 589

EmployeeDetails

EmpId Project Salary

121 P1 8000

321 P2 9000

421 P3 9500

EmployeeSalary

SELECT *
FROM EmployeeDetails INNERJOIN EmployeeSalary
ON EmployeeDetails.EmpId = EmployeeSalary.EmpId;

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 Ques.2. Explain the different types of Joins in SQL?
Ans. Some of the major joins in SQL are-

Inner Join – Inner join is used to return the records which are having
matching values in both the tables.
Left Join – Left join is used to concatenate all the rows of the left table
and the matching rows in the right table.
Right Join-Right join is used to concatenate all the rows of the right table
and the matching rows in the left table.
Full Join-Full join is used to return all the records of both the tables as
long as there is a matching record in either table.
Self Join-Self join is a join that is used to join a table to itself. In a self-
join, a table is considered as if it were two tables.
Cartesian Join-Cartesian join is used to return the number of rows in the
first table multiplied by the number of rows in the second table. It is also
referred to as cross join.

Ques.3. What is the difference between Inner and Self Join?

Ans. A Self join is a type of Inner join.
Inner join is used to return the records which are present in both tables.
Whereas, in self join, a table is joined to itself.

Ques.4. What is the difference between Full Join and Cross Join?
Ans. A Full Outer Join is a combination of a Left Outer and Right Outer Join. It
returns all rows in both tables that match the query’s WHERE clause, and in
cases where the ON condition is not satisfied, it puts NULL values.
Whereas, a Cross join produces a cartesian product between the two tables,
returning all possible combinations of all rows.

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 Ques.5. What is Natural Join?
Ans. Natural join is used to create an implicit join clause based on the value of
common attributes in the two tables. Common attributes are the attributes that
have the same name in both tables. Natural join does not need any comparison
operator as in the case of equi join.

Example – In the below two tables the Employee and Department tables have a
common field ‘EmpNo’. So, in the case of natural joins, we don’t need to
mention the On clause over the ‘EmpNo’ field of both the tables.

EmpId Name City

568 KD Seattle

897 PK Austin

215 PP Miami

Employees

DeptId DName EmpId

5466 HR 897

5219 IT 215

8795 HK 568

Department

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 SELECT Employees.Name, Department.DName
FROM Department
Natural JOIN Employees

Ques.6. What is an Equi Join?

Ans. An Equi Join is a type of join that combines tables based on matching
values in the specified columns.

The column names do not need to be the same.

The resultant table can contain repeated columns.
It is possible to perform an equi join on more than two tables.

Syntax-

SELECT *
FROM TableName1
JOIN TableName2
ON TableName1.ColumnName = TableName2.ColumnName;

“ Also check – SQL Query Interview Questions.

Ques.7. What is a non-equi join?

Ans. A non-equi join is a join in which join conditions use conditional operators
instead of equals operator. Syntax-

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 SELECT *
FROM TableName1
JOIN TableName2
ON TableName1.ColumnName [>,<,>=,<= ] TableName2.ColumnName;

Ques.8. What is the difference between cross join and natural join?
Ans. A cross join produces a cross product or cartesian product of two tables
whereas the natural join is based on all the columns having the same name and
data types in both the tables.

Ques.9. How are Joins different from the Union clause?

Ans. Some features of Joins are-

1. Join combines attributes of the rows present in the two tables that share
some common fields or attributes.
2. Join is applicable when the two tables have at least one common
attribute.
3. There are many types of joins like INNER JOIN, OUTER JOIN, LEFT
JOIN, RIGHT JOIN, etc.
4. The length of the resultant rows is more as compared to the length of
rows of the tables involved.

Whereas in case of Union-

1. Join combines rows of the tables that are present in the query.
2. Join is applicable when the number of columns present in the query is the
same and the corresponding attributes have the same domain.
3. There are two types of a union like UNION and UNION ALL.
4. The number of the resultant rows is more as compared to the number of
rows present in each table involved in the query.

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 Ques.10. Write the SQL command to join 3 tables.
Ans. Consider the below 3 tables. Now in order to fetch EmpName, DeptName,
Gender information of all the employees, we will join the 3 tables.

EmpNo EmpName DeptId GenderId

1886 John Snow 101 1

1889 Amara Giselle 102 2

1890 Richie Tung 102 1

Table – Employees

DeptId DeptName

101 HR

102 IT

Table – Department

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 GenderId Gender

01 Male

02 Female

Table – Gender

SELECT EmpName, DeptName, Gender

FROM Employees
JOIN Departement ON Employees.DeptId=Department.DeptId
JOIN Genders ON Employees.GenderId=Genders.GenderID;

This completes our article on top SQL joins interview questions. We hope, these
questions will help you in your interviews.

Kuldeep Rana
Kuldeep is the founder and lead author of ArtOfTesting. He is skilled in
test automation, performance testing, big data, and CI-CD. He brings
his decade of experience to his current role where he is dedicated to
educating the QA professionals. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.

Interview, SQL

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