In the MySQL documentation for joins, a coworker pointed out this gem to me today:

RIGHT JOIN works analogously to LEFT JOIN . To keep code portable across databases, it is recommended that you use LEFT JOIN instead of RIGHT JOIN .

Is anyone able to shed some light on this? This strikes me as probably a remnant of a past age - as in maybe the documentation means to say "To keep code reverse compatible with earlier versions of MySQL..."

Is there a modern RDBMS that doesn't support RIGHT JOIN ? I get that RIGHT JOIN is syntactic sugar over LEFT JOIN , and any RIGHT JOIN can be expressed as a LEFT JOIN , but there are times when readability suffers if you write a query in that direction.