left join turns into inner join

Question

It's because of your WHERE clause.

Whenever you specify a value from the right side of a left join in a WHERE clause (which is NOT NULL), you necessarily eliminate all of the NULL values and it essentially becomes an INNER JOIN.

If you write, AND (c.foobar = 'somethingelse' OR c.foobar IS NULL) that will solve the problem.

You can also move the c.foobar portion into your join predicate, and that too will solve the issue.

The reason you're seeing this is because the left join sets all columns of c to NULL for those rows that don't exist in c (i.e. that can't be joined). This implies that the comparison c.foobar = 'somethingelse' is not true, which is why those rows are not being returned.

In the case where you move the c.foobar = 'somethingelse' into the join condition, that join is still returning those rows (albeit with NULL values) when the condition is not true.

The 'where' clause is performed after the join. This doesn't matter for inner joins but matters for outer joins.

Shorten Example

SELECT b.bar,c.foobar FROM tableTwo AS b LEFT JOIN tableThree AS c ON b.pk=c.fk WHERE c.foobar='somethingelse'

Raw data                  Outer Join Result        Select Result
b.pk c.fk c.foorbar       b.pk c.fk c.foorbar      c.foorbar
1    1    something       1    1    something      <not in result set>
1    1    somethingelse   1    1    somethingelse  somethingelse


SELECT b.bar,c.foobar FROM tableTwo AS b LEFT JOIN tableThree AS c ON b.pk=c.fk AND c.foobar='somethingelse'

Raw data                  Outer Join Result        Select Result
b.pk c.fk c.foorbar       b.pk c.fk c.foorbar      c.foorbar
1    1    something       1    null null           null
1    1    somethingelse   1    1    somethingelse  somethingelse