Outer join with nested tables

Question

I am dealing with a nested table (I simplified the case
for purpose of posting):
CREATE TABLE boris_main_tab (
IND_SSN          VARCHAR2(9) PRIMARY KEY,
children          B_CHILDREN_TBL,
) nested table children stored as....
where B_CHILDREN_TBL is defined like this:
create or replace type b_children_type as object (
     child_ssn               VARCHAR2(9),
     child_first_name          VARCHAR2(20),
     child_last_name          VARCHAR2(20),
     child_dob               date
create or replace type b_children_tbl as table of b_children_type;
if I want to display person's ssn along with his/her children information I do like this:
SELECT m.ind_ssn, c.child_ssn, c.child_first_name
FROM boris_main_tab m,
TABLE(m.children) c
This is a statement I can find everywhere. But there is a caveat here, they
forgot to mention. This is really an inner join, so I don't get childless
people. Can you, guys, help me with the outer join syntax?
I mean, of course, I found the obvious solution to make this inner join
into a view and then join it with the boris_main_tab again this time using the
regular outer join syntax. But it seems to me there has to be something simplier than that.
But I can't find it. It really hurting me, since I have a few nested table
columsn and people want to see the records where I need to mention a few of
them, sort of like
from boris_main_tab m, TABLE(m.children) c, TABLE(m.spouses) s
where c.child_last_name <> m.spouse.last_name
in cases like this the fact that EACH of these joins is inner join really
hurts the logic.
Respectfully,
Boris

Answer 1

Hi Borris,
Found the following in the Oracle Documentation under: Oracle8i Application Developer's Guide - Object-Relational Features Release 2 (8.1.6)
2 Managing Oracle Objects / Using Collections / Collection Unnesting
URL: http://www.znow.com/sales/oracle/appdev.816/a76976/adobjmng.htm#1002885
Oracle8i also supports the following syntax to produce outer-join results:
SELECT d.*, e.* FROM depts d, TABLE(d.emps)(+) e;
The (+) indicates that the dependent join between DEPTS and D.EMPS should be NULL-augmented. That is, there > will be rows of DEPTS in the output for which D.EMPS is NULL or empty, with NULL values for columns
corresponding to D.EMPS.