Natural joins of views and derived tables

An extension to the ANSI/ISO SQL standard is that you can specify views or derived tables on either side of a natural join. In the following statement,

SELECT *
FROM View1 NATURAL JOIN View2;

the columns in View1 are compared to the columns in View2. If, for example, a column called EmployeeID is found to occur in both views, and there are no other columns that have identical names, then the generated join condition is (View1.EmployeeID = View2.EmployeeID).

Example

The following example illustrates that a view used in a natural join can include expressions, and not just columns, and they are treated the same way in the natural join. First, create the view V with a column called x, as follows:

CREATE VIEW V(x) AS
SELECT R.y + 1
FROM R;

Next, create a natural join of the view to a derived table. The derived table has a correlation name T with a column called x.

SELECT *
FROM V NATURAL JOIN (SELECT P.y FROM P) as T(x);

This join is equivalent to the following:

SELECT *
FROM V JOIN (SELECT P.y FROM P) as T(x) ON (V.x = T.x);

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