Is there a reason MySQL doesn't support FULL OUTER JOINS?

Question

Is there a reason MySQL doesn\'t support FULL OUTER JOINS? I\'ve tried full outer join syntax in mysql many times and it never worked, just found out its not supported by my

Answer 1

MySQL lacks a lot of functionality that other databases have*. I think they have a pretty huge backlog of ideas and not enough developers to implement them all.

This feature was requested in 2006 and is still not implemented. I guess it has low priority because you can work around it by combining LEFT and RIGHT OUTER JOIN with a UNION ALL. Not pleasant, but it does the trick. Change this:

SELECT *
FROM table1
FULL OUTER JOIN table2
ON table1.table2_id = table2.id

to this:

SELECT *
FROM table1
LEFT JOIN table2
ON table1.table2_id = table2.id
UNION ALL
SELECT *
FROM table1
RIGHT JOIN table2
ON table1.table2_id = table2.id
WHERE table1.table2_id IS NULL

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* To be fair to MySQL, they also have some features that many other databases don't have.