Is there any catch? Yes there is — left joins are a form of outer join, while inner joins are a form of, well, inner join.
Here’s examples that show the difference. We’ll start with the base data:
mysql> select * from j1;
+----+------------+
| id | thing |
+----+------------+
| 1 | hi |
| 2 | hello |
| 3 | guten tag |
| 4 | ciao |
| 5 | buongiorno |
+----+------------+
mysql> select * from j2;
+----+-----------+
| id | thing |
+----+-----------+
| 1 | bye |
| 3 | tschau |
| 4 | au revoir |
| 6 | so long |
| 7 | tschuessi |
+----+-----------+
And here we’ll see the difference between an inner join and a left join:
mysql> select * from j1 inner join j2 on j1.id = j2.id;
+----+-----------+----+-----------+
| id | thing | id | thing |
+----+-----------+----+-----------+
| 1 | hi | 1 | bye |
| 3 | guten tag | 3 | tschau |
| 4 | ciao | 4 | au revoir |
+----+-----------+----+-----------+
Hmm, 3 rows.
mysql> select * from j1 left join j2 on j1.id = j2.id;
+----+------------+------+-----------+
| id | thing | id | thing |
+----+------------+------+-----------+
| 1 | hi | 1 | bye |
| 2 | hello | NULL | NULL |
| 3 | guten tag | 3 | tschau |
| 4 | ciao | 4 | au revoir |
| 5 | buongiorno | NULL | NULL |
+----+------------+------+-----------+
Wow, 5 rows! What happened?
Outer joins such as left join preserve rows that don’t match — so rows with id 2 and 5 are preserved by the left join query. The remaining columns are filled in with NULL.
In other words, left and inner joins are not interchangeable.