Queries

As predicted by Professor Fulton, my main struggle this week was constructing queries using JOIN. Ultimately, I was able to syntactically create queries that worked, but honestly I am not sure that I really understand the difference between a left join and a right join and when you would use which. Maybe it will make more sense to me over time with practice. I am thrilled to be learning how to get behind the scenes with MySQL and think this may be one of the most useful aspects of the course for me. It directly relates to my work with the Archivists' Toolkit and potentially other projects as well. The rest of the MySQL training was easy and I had no trouble picking up the syntax. Like I said, I can construct correct queries (well maybe after one error return!), but I don't really understand what difference the left and right join are making conceptually in the data that is returned. It could just be that it wasn't really relevant to the data we inputted because none of our tables or rows had null values. Perhaps that would make the difference more evident, or maybe I am still way off?