Surprised, huh? If there are 8 movies and 5 directors, most people will say that we'll get 5, 8 or 13 rows in the result. This is not true.
We've got 40 rows altogether because SQL takes every single movie and joins it with every possible director. So we now have 8 * 5 = 40 rows!
Why did this happen? SQL doesn't know what to do with the results from the two tables, so it gave you every possible connection. How can we change it? Take a look:
SELECT *
FROM person, car
WHERE person.id = car.owner_id;
We've set a new condition in the WHERE
clause. We now see only those connections where id
from person
is the same as owner_id
from car
. Makes sense, right?
Take a closer look at how we provide the information about columns in the WHERE
condition. If you have multiple tables, you should refer to specific columns by giving the name of the table and the column, separated by a dot (.
). As a result, the column owner_id
from the car
table becomes car.owner_id
and so on.