Bidirectional outer JOIN
Suppose we have a table A:
itemid mark
1 5
2 3
and table B:
itemid mark
1 3
3 5
I want to join A*B on A.itemid=B.itemid both right and left ways. i.e. result:
itemid A.mark B.mark
1 5 3
2 3 NULL
3 NULL 5
Is there a way to do it in one query in MySQL?
Best answer :
It's called a full outer join and it's not supported natively in MySQL, judging from its docs. You can work around this limitation using UNION as described in the comments to the page I linked to.
[edit] Since others posted snippets, here you go. You can see explanation on the linked page.
SELECT *
FROM A LEFT JOIN B ON A.id = B.id
UNION ALL
SELECT *
FROM A RIGHT JOIN B ON A.id = B.id
WHERE A.id IS NULL
source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9614/bidirectional-outer-join