I thought Ligaya Turmelle's post on SQL joins was a great primer for novice developers. Since SQL joins appear to be set-based, the use of Venn diagrams to explain them seems, at first blush, to be a natural fit. However, like the commenters to her post, I found that the Venn diagrams didn't quite match the SQL join syntax reality in my testing. I love the concept, though, so let's see if we can make it work. Assume we have the following two tables. Table A is on the left, and Table B is on the right. We'll populate them with four records each. id name id name -- ---- -- ---- 1 Pirate 1 Rutabaga 2 Monkey 2 Pirate 3 Ninja 3 Darth Vader 4 Spaghetti 4 Ninja Let's join these tables by the name field in a few different ways and see if we can get a conceptual match to those nifty Venn diagrams. - scotu