The difference between a non- lateral and a lateral join lies in whether you can look to the left hand table's row.

LEFT OUTER JOIN First, an inner join is performed. Then, for each row in T1 that does not satisfy the join condition with any row in T2, a joined row is added with null values in columns of T2. Thus, the joined table always has at least one row for each row in T1.

It is often particularly handy to LEFT JOIN to a LATERAL subquery, so that source rows will appear in the result even if the LATERAL subquery produces no rows for them.

SELECT lateral_subquery.* FROM posts JOIN LATERAL ( SELECT comments.* FROM comments WHERE (comments.post_id = posts.id) LIMIT 3 ) lateral_subquery ON true WHERE posts.id

You want the front page to show a few hundred posts along with the top three comments on each post. You’re planning on being very popular, so the front page will need to be very fast. How do you fetch that data efficiently from postgresql using Activerecord?

Making one Comment query per Post is too expensive; it’s N+1 queries (one to fetch the posts, N to fetch the comments). You could use includes to preload all the comments for all the posts, but that requires hydrating hundreds of thousands of records, even though you only need a few hundred for your front page. What you want is some kind of GROUP BY with a LIMIT on each group — but that doesn’t exist, either in Activerecord nor even in postgres. Postgres has a different solution for this problem: the LATERAL JOIN.

Inner Join Venn Diagram

join = Arel::Nodes::NamedFunction.new('json_b_array_elements', [Arel::Nodes::SqlLiteral.new("subscriptions")]) .as(Arel::Nodes::NamedFunction.new('sd', [Arel::Nodes::SqlLiteral.new("subscription_data")]).to_sql) p = e.project( Arel::Nodes::SqlLiteral.new( Arel::Nodes::Grouping.new( Arel::Nodes::InfixOperation.new('->>', sd[:subscription_data], Arel::Nodes::SqlLiteral.new("'id'"))).to_sql) << '::uuid' ).where( Arel::Nodes::InfixOperation.new('->>', sd[:subscription_data], Arel::Nodes::SqlLiteral.new("'type'").eq( Arel::Nodes::SqlLiteral.new("'Company'") ) ).and(e[:slug].eq(event_slug))) p.join_sources << Arel::Nodes::StringJoin.new( Arel::Nodes::SqlLiteral.new('CROSS JOIN LATERAL')) << join

The clean way to call a set-returning function is LEFT [OUTER] JOIN LATERAL. This includes rows without children. To exclude those, change to a [INNER] JOIN LATERAL