So far I have read (and tried) that there is not difference between LEFT - LEFT OUTER and RIGHT - RIGHT OUTER joins, but if there is no difference at all why do we have both options? Are there any performance issues or some compatibility issues?

No difference at all. Just "syntactic sugar" as one of my compiler friends was wont to call stuff like this.

Lots of example of this kind of stuff in SQL. Another one:
    SELECT ... FROM table T
vs.
    SELECT ... FROM table AS T

100% identical. And if the SQL compiler is built along standard compiler lines (i.e., using LEX and YACC or their custom equivalents), then there won't be any performance difference, either. [Even if there were a diff, it would be nanoseconds at most.]

Hi

Probably it would explicitly make the fellow coders like us 'feel' it is Outer Join and Not Inner Join.

For a query in which you have both inner and outer joins, it would be better to have as LEFT OUTER instead of LEFT for more brevity

Cheers
Shasur

http://www.dotnetdud.blogspot.com

VBA Tips & Tricks (http://www.vbadud.blogspot.com)

Thank you guys.