I don't always use a RIGHT JOIN, but when I do, it's because I am lazy

Do you use RIGHT JOINs? I myself rarely use a RIGHT JOIN, I think in the last 17 years or so I have only used a RIGHT JOIN once or twice. I think that RIGHT JOINs confuse people who are new to databases, everything that you can do with a RIGHT JOIN, you can also do with a LEFT JOIN, you just have to flip the query around

So why did I use a RIGHT JOIN then?

Well the answer is in the image below

That is right..it was pure laziness, if you ever met a programmer, you will find out pretty quickly that programmers are pretty lazy. I guess lazy is not the right word to use here, it is better to call programmers efficient or people who don't want to reinvent the wheel.

So what actually happened? I was checking some data in a table, I already had written the following query

SELECT number 
FROM SomeTableWithIDs c

Now I just needed to see how many numbers were not used

So what did I do, I just continued below the query I already had, I ended up with this

SELECT number 
FROM SomeTableWithIDs c
RIGHT JOIN(SELECT number 
FROM master..spt_values 
WHERE type = 'p' 
AND number BETWEEN 0 and 255) x on c.SomeID = x.number
WHERE c.SomeID is null

Let's take a look at this again with some DDL and DML you can run

First create the following table, it has only one column, this column has a tinyint data type (don't ask why it is tinyint, this is the reason I had to take a look at how many unused IDs we had to begin with)

CREATE TABLE SomeTableWithIDs (SomeID tinyint not null )

ALTER TABLE SomeTableWithIDs
ADD CONSTRAINT PK_SomeTableWithIDs PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (SomeID)

Now that we have the table created, let's populate it with 250 rows

INSERT SomeTableWithIDs
SELECT TOP 250 ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY s.ID)
FROM sys.sysobjects s
CROSS JOIN sys.sysobjects s2

Let's delete a couple of rows

DELETE SomeTableWithIDs WHERE SomeID IN (2,4,6,11)

Running the RIGHT JOIN query will give us the missing rows

SELECT number 
FROM SomeTableWithIDs c
RIGHT JOIN(SELECT number 
FROM master..spt_values 
WHERE type = 'p' 
AND number BETWEEN 0 and 255) x on c.SomeID = x.number
WHERE c.SomeID is null

Here is the output

0
2
4
6
11
251
252
253
254
255



Now you have to realize that this was just an ad-hoc query, if I were to put this in a proc or script, I would have done it like this

SELECT number 
FROM master..spt_values s
WHERE type = 'p' 
AND number BETWEEN 0 and 255
AND NOT EXISTS (SELECT SomeID 
   FROM SomeTableWithIDs c 
   WHERE c.SomeID = s.number)

That query is less confusing for beginners than a RIGHT JOIN