Joining Tables: INNER JOIN

So far every query has looked at one table. Real questions usually need data from multiple tables — that's what JOIN is for.

Why we need joins

The employees table only stores a department_id number — not the department's name. To show employee names alongside their department name, we need to combine employees with departments.

INNER JOIN syntax

SELECT e.first_name, e.last_name, d.name AS department_name
FROM employees e
INNER JOIN departments d ON e.department_id = d.id;

Result: first 5 of 26 rows (the order can differ on other engines unless you add ORDER BY)

first_name	last_name	department_name
Ali	Sheikh	Engineering
Sara	Qureshi	Sales
Ahmed	Qureshi	Marketing
Ayesha	Sheikh	Human Resources
Bilal	Ahmed	Finance

Breaking this down:

• e and d are aliases — short nicknames for the tables, used to keep column references unambiguous and queries shorter.
• ON e.department_id = d.id is the join condition — it tells the database how the two tables relate.
• INNER JOIN returns only rows where the condition matches on both sides. An employee with a department_id that doesn't exist in departments (or a NULL one) would be excluded entirely.

Joining three or more tables

Chain joins together to pull in as many related tables as you need:

SELECT o.id AS order_id, c.customer_name, e.first_name AS handled_by, o.order_date
FROM orders o
INNER JOIN customers c ON o.customer_id = c.id
INNER JOIN employees e ON o.employee_id = e.id;

Result: first 5 of 50 rows (the order can differ on other engines unless you add ORDER BY)

order_id	customer_name	handled_by	order_date
1	Danish Raza	Rabia	2023-10-24
2	Hina Chaudhry	Sadia	2024-06-09
3	Tariq Ahmed	Sara	2023-11-26
4	Omar Malik	Zara	2023-08-28
5	Tariq Chaudhry	Zara	2024-06-03

Joining with a WHERE clause

SELECT e.first_name, d.name AS department_name
FROM employees e
INNER JOIN departments d ON e.department_id = d.id
WHERE d.location = 'Lahore';

Result: first 5 of 9 rows (the order can differ on other engines unless you add ORDER BY)

first_name	department_name
Ali	Engineering
Ayesha	Human Resources
Usman	Engineering
Mahnoor	Human Resources
Tariq	Engineering

JOIN vs INNER JOIN

Plain JOIN is exactly the same as INNER JOIN — the INNER keyword is optional but recommended for clarity, especially once you start using outer joins in the next article.

Open the Code Playground, pick any SQL engine (SQLite, PostgreSQL, MySQL, or SQL Server), and paste these queries in directly — the practice database above is already loaded for you, every time.