As the name suggests UNION ALL in Oracle SQL / PLSQL query is used to join or combine results from 2 or more SELECT statements, a UNION ALL does not excludes the duplicate rows returned by SQL SELECT statements.
Also, each SELECT statement must have the same number of column(s)/field(s) with similar data-types for the UNION ALL to work.
Syntax for UNION ALL in Oracle SQL / PLSQL is:
SELECT column_name1
,column_name2
.
.
,column_nameN
FROM table_name(s)
UNION ALL
SELECT column_name1
,column_name2
.
.
,column_nameN
FROM table_name(s);
Suppose have a table named ‘employee’ in the database as shown below:
| Employee_Id | Employee_Name | Salary | Department | Commission |
| 101 | Emp A | 10000 | Sales | 10 |
| 102 | Emp B | 20000 | IT | 20 |
| 103 | Emp C | 28000 | IT | 20 |
| 104 | Emp D | 30000 | Support | |
| 105 | Emp E | 32000 | Sales | 10 |
Also we have one more table ‘comm’ as shown below:
| Emp_Id | Commission_Percent |
| 102 | 20 |
| 103 | 20 |
| 104 | |
| 105 | 10 |
| 106 | 15 |
| 107 | 25 |
Let’s take an example to understand UNION ALL, suppose we write our SQL query using UNION ALL as:
SELECT employee_id FROM employee UNION ALL SELECT emp_id FROM comm;
The result of the above query will be:
| Emp_Id |
| 101 |
| 102 |
| 102 |
| 103 |
| 103 |
| 104 |
| 104 |
| 105 |
| 105 |
| 106 |
| 107 |
Here we can see that the records for employee_id = ‘102’,’103,’104’ and ‘105’ appear twice in the result set because they are present in both (‘employee’ and ‘comm’) tables. Also note that all the ‘employee_id’ from both ‘employee’ and ‘comm’ tables are present in the result set.