Glossary / JOIN

JOIN

Practical PostgreSQL glossary entry with a clear definition, example, and benchmarking context.

What Is JOIN?

A JOIN combines rows from two or more tables based on a common column. PostgreSQL supports INNER, LEFT, RIGHT, FULL, and CROSS JOINs. It's essential for querying normalized data.

Why It Matters for PostgreSQL Performance

In PostgreSQL performance work, JOIN affects throughput, latency, or operational reliability depending on workload and configuration.

Practical Benchmarking Context

When benchmarking with pgbench, track how JOIN changes behavior across scale factor, client concurrency, and storage conditions.

Use this term together with workload shape, concurrency level, and scale factor when interpreting pgbench outputs. Isolated values can be misleading without full run context.

Example

Example: SELECT * FROM orders JOIN users ON orders.user_id = users.id;

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