Skip to main content

Combine two tables

Problem Statement​

Table: Person

+-------------+---------+
| Column Name | Type |
+-------------+---------+
| personId | int |
| lastName | varchar |
| firstName | varchar |
+-------------+---------+
personId is the primary key (column with unique values) for this table.
This table contains information about the ID of some persons and their first and last names.

Table: Address

+-------------+---------+
| Column Name | Type |
+-------------+---------+
| addressId | int |
| personId | int |
| city | varchar |
| state | varchar |
+-------------+---------+
addressId is the primary key (column with unique values) for this table.
Each row of this table contains information about the city and state of one person with ID = PersonId.

Write a solution to report the first name, last name, city, and state of each person in the Person table. If the address of a personId is not present in the Address table, report null instead.

Return the result table in any order.

The result format is in the following example.

Examples​

Example 1:

Input: 
Person table:
+----------+----------+-----------+
| personId | lastName | firstName |
+----------+----------+-----------+
| 1 | Wang | Allen |
| 2 | Alice | Bob |
+----------+----------+-----------+
Address table:
+-----------+----------+---------------+------------+
| addressId | personId | city | state |
+-----------+----------+---------------+------------+
| 1 | 2 | New York City | New York |
| 2 | 3 | Leetcode | California |
+-----------+----------+---------------+------------+
Output:
+-----------+----------+---------------+----------+
| firstName | lastName | city | state |
+-----------+----------+---------------+----------+
| Allen | Wang | Null | Null |
| Bob | Alice | New York City | New York |
+-----------+----------+---------------+----------+
Explanation:
There is no address in the address table for the personId = 1 so we return null in their city and state.
addressId = 1 contains information about the address of personId = 2.

Solution​

Approach 1: Using outer join​

Intuition​

  • Since the PersonId in table Address is the foreign key of table Person, we can join these two tables to get the address information of a person.

  • Considering there might be no address information for every person, we should use outer join instead of the default inner join.

Implementation​

  • Note: For MySQL, an outer join is performed either using left join or right join.
select FirstName, LastName, City, State
from Person left join Address
on Person.PersonId = Address.PersonId
;
  • Note: Using the where clause to filter the records will fail if there is no address information for a person because it will not display the name information.