Question

Structure of the BOOKS table / Structure of the PUBLISHER table

Which of the following SQL statements will display the title of each book in the BOOKS table and the name of its publisher?

a) SELECT title, publisher_name
FROM books
JOIN publisher ON books.publisher_id = publisher.publisher_id;

b) SELECT title, publisher_name
FROM books
LEFT JOIN publisher ON books.publisher_id = publisher.publisher_id;

c) SELECT title, publisher_name
FROM books
RIGHT JOIN publisher ON books.publisher_id = publisher.publisher_id;

d) SELECT title, publisher_name
FROM books, publisher
WHERE books.publisher_id = publisher.publisher_id;

Answer 1

The correct SQL statement to display the title of each book and its publisher's name, assuming a structure with 'publisher_id' as a common column in both tables, is an inner join (option a).

Step-by-step explanation:

The question pertains to running an SQL query to display the title of each book in the BOOKS table and the name of its publisher from the PUBLISHER table. Considering the structures given for both tables, the correct SQL statement would be:

a) SELECT title, publisher_name FROM books JOIN publisher ON books.publisher_id = publisher.publisher_id;

This statement performs an inner join, which will return all rows from books and publisher where the publisher_id matches. The other options are also forms of SQL joins, but they may return different results: Option b) is a LEFT JOIN, which will return all records from the left table (books), and the matched records from the right table (publisher), plus the unmatched rows from the left table with NULL in the columns from the right table. Option c) is a RIGHT JOIN, which does the opposite of a LEFT JOIN, and option d) uses an older syntax for joins, which might be discouraged in favor of explicit JOIN syntax.