Documentation on "Inner Join"

Question

We are in the process of migrating to Oracle 9.2 and I was reading about some of the new features. In one of the code examples there was a query written using the "inner join" command, something that I was not familiar with but that was not presented as a new feature. I've since tried using this and there appears to be significant performance gains in its use but I am unable to find any documentation relating to it. One of the developers here said that MS Access often uses this syntax so is it included for compatibility or is it something I should be looking to use more often?
Can someone provide me with the link to the relevant documentation for this feature or explain its use more fully i.e. can it deal with complex joins?
Thanks
Richard

Answer 1

There isn't much documentation that I've found on the ANSI joins. Here is one in the SQL reference:
http://download-west.oracle.com/docs/cd/B10501_01/server.920/a96540/statements_103a.htm#2080352
One advantage to using the ANSI joins is greater flexibility with outer joins. Another advantage is explicit documentation of cartesian products with the CROSS JOIN keyword (no reson to wonder why someone just left out the join). Finally, the ANSI join syntax allows one to remove join-code from the WHERE clause making the WHERE clause much easier to read (it only has conditions).
As far as performance goes, I haven't noticed any change (good or bad) whilist switching over to ANSI joins...
Stan