Last week I was surprised to find out that sybase 12 doesn't support full outer joins. But it occurred to me that a full outer join should be the same as a left outer join unioned with a right outer join of the same sql. Can anybody think of a reason this would not hold true?
UNION-ing two OUTER JOIN statements should result in duplicate rows representing the data you'd get from an INNER JOIN. You'd have to probably do a SELECT DISTINCT on the data set produced by the UNION. Generally if you have to use a SELECT DISTINCT that means it's not a well-designed query (or so I've heard).