MySQL JOIN ON vs USING?
In a MySQL JOIN
, what is the difference between ON
and USING()
? As far as I can tell, USING()
is just more convenient syntax, whereas ON
allows a little more flexibility when the column names are not identical. However, that difference is so minor, you'd think they'd just do away with USING()
.
Is there more to this than meets the eye? If yes, which should I use in a given situation?
Solution 1:
It is mostly syntactic sugar, but a couple differences are noteworthy:
ON is the more general of the two. One can join tables ON a column, a set of columns and even a condition. For example:
SELECT * FROM world.City JOIN world.Country ON (City.CountryCode = Country.Code) WHERE ...
USING is useful when both tables share a column of the exact same name on which they join. In this case, one may say:
SELECT ... FROM film JOIN film_actor USING (film_id) WHERE ...
An additional nice treat is that one does not need to fully qualify the joining columns:
SELECT film.title, film_id -- film_id is not prefixed
FROM film
JOIN film_actor USING (film_id)
WHERE ...
To illustrate, to do the above with ON, we would have to write:
SELECT film.title, film.film_id -- film.film_id is required here
FROM film
JOIN film_actor ON (film.film_id = film_actor.film_id)
WHERE ...
Notice the film.film_id
qualification in the SELECT
clause. It would be invalid to just say film_id
since that would make for an ambiguity:
ERROR 1052 (23000): Column 'film_id' in field list is ambiguous
As for select *
, the joining column appears in the result set twice with ON
while it appears only once with USING
:
mysql> create table t(i int);insert t select 1;create table t2 select*from t;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.11 sec)
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
Records: 1 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.19 sec)
Records: 1 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0
mysql> select*from t join t2 on t.i=t2.i;
+------+------+
| i | i |
+------+------+
| 1 | 1 |
+------+------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
mysql> select*from t join t2 using(i);
+------+
| i |
+------+
| 1 |
+------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
mysql>
Solution 2:
Thought I would chip in here with when I have found ON
to be more useful than USING
. It is when OUTER
joins are introduced into queries.
ON
benefits from allowing the results set of the table that a query is OUTER
joining onto to be restricted while maintaining the OUTER
join. Attempting to restrict the results set through specifying a WHERE
clause will, effectively, change the OUTER
join into an INNER
join.
Granted this may be a relative corner case. Worth putting out there though.....
For example:
CREATE TABLE country (
countryId int(10) unsigned NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT,
country varchar(50) not null,
UNIQUE KEY countryUIdx1 (country)
) ENGINE=InnoDB;
insert into country(country) values ("France");
insert into country(country) values ("China");
insert into country(country) values ("USA");
insert into country(country) values ("Italy");
insert into country(country) values ("UK");
insert into country(country) values ("Monaco");
CREATE TABLE city (
cityId int(10) unsigned NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT,
countryId int(10) unsigned not null,
city varchar(50) not null,
hasAirport boolean not null default true,
UNIQUE KEY cityUIdx1 (countryId,city),
CONSTRAINT city_country_fk1 FOREIGN KEY (countryId) REFERENCES country (countryId)
) ENGINE=InnoDB;
insert into city (countryId,city,hasAirport) values (1,"Paris",true);
insert into city (countryId,city,hasAirport) values (2,"Bejing",true);
insert into city (countryId,city,hasAirport) values (3,"New York",true);
insert into city (countryId,city,hasAirport) values (4,"Napoli",true);
insert into city (countryId,city,hasAirport) values (5,"Manchester",true);
insert into city (countryId,city,hasAirport) values (5,"Birmingham",false);
insert into city (countryId,city,hasAirport) values (3,"Cincinatti",false);
insert into city (countryId,city,hasAirport) values (6,"Monaco",false);
-- Gah. Left outer join is now effectively an inner join
-- because of the where predicate
select *
from country left join city using (countryId)
where hasAirport
;
-- Hooray! I can see Monaco again thanks to
-- moving my predicate into the ON
select *
from country co left join city ci on (co.countryId=ci.countryId and ci.hasAirport)
;