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Comment by miahi | Hacker News Reader

I also find the Oracle outer join operator (+) easier to use.

I just searched the full (Oracle) sql codebase of the project I'm working on, and it seems that there is no clear winner in the "outer join" vs "(+)" battle (outer = 46%, (+) = 54%). There is no code style requirement for joins.

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I have trouble with the oracle syntax once you get to two or three tables left joined against each other, and consider it more a relic of old oracle programmers than any actual advantage one way or the other.

I think I read recently that using the Oracle (+) operator can give you the error "cannot outer join to more than one table" if you try to outer join to two or more, but the ANSI syntax will allow you to do that - I really should test this out ...

edit - I tried this out and right now cannot get that error, so not sure where I got that idea from.

This code:

    Where a.client_id = c.client_id
    And a.client_id = b.client_id (+)
    And c.client_id = b.client_id (+)

Doesn't fly in our database

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