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Tips for derived tables in SQL and using FULL OUTER JOINs

My question is regarding FULL OUTER JOINs on derived tables. My query is as follows:

select tb1.usr,tb1.ADD,tb2.UPD from
(select usr,count(nin) ADD   
from RGS8 where act='ADD' 
and dte=20080310 group by usr)  tb1 
FULL OUTER JOIN
(select usr,count(nin) UPD   
from RGS8 where act='UPD' 
and dte=20080310 group by usr)  tb2 
ON tb1.usr=tb2.usr

The query executes successfully when using the left or the right outer joins but no results are given with the full outer joins. I wonder if there are some constraints with FULL OUTER JOINs?

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I'm not sure why it isn't working for you, unless perhaps you're using MySQL, which doesn't support FULL OUTER JOIN. But in that case you should've received an error message, rather than no results.

Here's an alternate strategy:

SELECT usr
     , SUM(CASE WHEN act = 'ADD'
                THEN 1
                ELSE 0 END) AS ADD
     , SUM(CASE WHEN act = 'UPD'
                THEN 1
                ELSE 0 END) AS UPD
  FROM RGS8 
 WHERE act IN ('ADD','UPD') 
   AND dte = 20080310 
GROUP 
    BY usr

This should perform better as well, since it requires only one pass of the table.

This was first published in October 2008

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