Join (SQL)A join clause in the Structured Query Language (SQL) combines columns from one or more tables into a new table. The operation corresponds to a join operation in relational algebra. Informally, a join stitches two tables and puts on the same row records with matching fields : INNER, LEFT OUTER, RIGHT OUTER, FULL OUTER and CROSS. To explain join types, the rest of this article uses the following tables: Department.DepartmentID is the primary key of the Department table, whereas Employee.DepartmentID is a foreign key.
Geographic information systemA geographic information system (GIS) consists of integrated computer hardware and software that store, manage, analyze, edit, output, and visualize geographic data. Much of this often happens within a spatial database, however, this is not essential to meet the definition of a GIS. In a broader sense, one may consider such a system also to include human users and support staff, procedures and workflows, the body of knowledge of relevant concepts and methods, and institutional organizations.
Sort-merge joinThe sort-merge join (also known as merge join) is a join algorithm and is used in the implementation of a relational database management system. The basic problem of a join algorithm is to find, for each distinct value of the join attribute, the set of tuples in each relation which display that value. The key idea of the sort-merge algorithm is to first sort the relations by the join attribute, so that interleaved linear scans will encounter these sets at the same time.
Geographic information scienceGeographic information science (GIScience, GISc) or geoinformation science is a scientific discipline at the crossroads of computational science, social science, and natural science that studies geographic information, including how it represents phenomena in the real world, how it represents the way humans understand the world, and how it can be captured, organized, and analyzed. It is a sub-field of geography, specifically part of technical geography.
Hash joinThe hash join is an example of a join algorithm and is used in the implementation of a relational database management system. All variants of hash join algorithms involve building hash tables from the tuples of one or both of the joined relations, and subsequently probing those tables so that only tuples with the same hash code need to be compared for equality in equijoins. Hash joins are typically more efficient than nested loops joins, except when the probe side of the join is very small.