What is the operation called when bringing two tables together to display related data?

The operation that brings two tables together to display related data is called a Join. In the context of relational databases, a Join allows you to retrieve related information from multiple tables using a common field or key. For instance, if you have a table of customers and a table of orders, a Join would enable you to combine these tables based on a customer ID, allowing you to view each customer's corresponding orders. This is essential for data retrieval, as it helps create a unified view of data that may be stored across different tables.

Joins can come in various types, such as inner joins, outer joins, left joins, and right joins, each serving different purposes depending on how the data should be retrieved. In contrast, other terms like "Merge" generally refer to combining datasets in different contexts, such as combining spreadsheets, and may not imply the relational link between tables that a Join does. The terms "Combine" and "Link" also do not specifically denote the relational database operation that brings data from separate tables based on shared attributes, making Join the most precise and widely used term in this scenario.