[T-SQL] Self Join – Inner Join and Outer Join

USE TempDb
GO
-- Create a Table
CREATE TABLE Employee(
EmployeeID INT PRIMARY KEY,
Name NVARCHAR(50),
ManagerID INT
)
GO
-- Insert Sample Data
INSERT INTO Employee
SELECT 1, 'Mike', 3
UNION ALL
SELECT 2, 'David', 3
UNION ALL
SELECT 3, 'Roger', NULL
UNION ALL
SELECT 4, 'Marry',2
UNION ALL
SELECT 5, 'Joseph',2
UNION ALL
SELECT 7, 'Ben',2
GO
-- Check the data
SELECT *
FROM Employee
GO



We will now use inner join to find the employees and their managers’ details.

-- Inner Join
SELECT e1.Name EmployeeName, e2.name AS ManagerName
FROM Employee e1
INNER JOIN Employee e2
ON e1.ManagerID = e2.EmployeeID
GO



From the result set, we can see that all the employees who have a manager are visible. However we are unable to find out the top manager of the company as he is not visible in our resultset. The reason for the same is that due to inner join, his name is filtered out. Inner join does not bring any result which does not have manager id. Let us convert Inner Join to Outer Join and then see the resultset.

-- Outer Join
SELECT e1.Name EmployeeName, ISNULL(e2.name, 'Top Manager') AS ManagerName
FROM Employee e1
LEFT JOIN Employee e2
ON e1.ManagerID = e2.EmployeeID
GO



Once we convert Inner Join to Outer Join, we can see the Top Manager as well. Here we have seen how Self Join can behave as an inner join as well as an outer join.