Even if you think you know everything about LEFT JOIN, I bet you will learn something or two in this post! The difference between the ON clause and the WHERE clause. A simple way to better understand a complex Matching-Condition with WHERE … IS NULL clause. The difference between the Matching-Conditions and the Where-conditions.

One way to do a “Conditional Join” in MySQL is by using a “LEFT JOIN”.  Create a “LEFT JOIN” for each condition and combine the results into one column using an “IF” statement by the “SELECT” expression.