Tips to identify unreferenced values across your tables with Python If you have worked with relational databases, you must know SQL joins — they have many use cases, but in this post, I am going to focus on data cleaning. When performing left, right, or full outer joins, you create tables where either all records are present or just records from certain tables. For a row with no match, a null value is placed. Joins are thus extremely useful for identifying missing or not referenced values.