A database operation that combines the values of 2 tables based on a condition, or relationship, that exists between those tables.
An inner join is the most common join operation used in applications and can be regarded as the default join-type. Inner join creates a new result table by combining column values of two tables (A and B) based upon the join-predicate. The query compares each row of A with each row of B to find all pairs of rows which satisfy the join-predicate.
When the join-predicate is satisfied, column values for each matched pair of rows of A and B are combined into a result row. The result of the join can be defined as the outcome of first taking the Cartesian product (or Cross join) of all records in the tables (combining every record in table A with every record in table B) then returning all records which satisfy the join predicate.
Actual SQL implementations normally use other approaches like a hash join or a sort-merge join where possible, since computing the Cartesian product is very inefficient.
