Ah... that makes sense. I have experimented a bit since my original comment and so far have not been able to come up with a syntactically elegant way of implementing LEFT JOIN in an imaginary MySQL that had inner JOIN as the only JOIN. This actually makes me wonder... if SQL only had inner JOIN, what would be the syntactically most elegant way of implementing the other JOINs? The various replies in this comment tree make me suppose that the answer would depend on the precise flavor of SQL being used.