Rails4: joins v/s includes

I was recently reading more on difference between :joins and :includes in rails. Here is an explanation of what I understood (with examples :))

Consider this scenario: A User has_many comments and a comment_belongs to a User. The User model has the following attributes: Name(string), Age(integer), Admin(boolean). The Comment model has the following attributes:Content, user_id.

Joins:

:joins performs a inner join between two tables. Thus

Comment.joins(:user)

#=> <ActiveRecord::Relation [#<Comment id: 1, content: "Hi I am Aaditi.This is my first   comment!", user_id: 1, created_at: "2014-11-12 18:29:24", updated_at: "2014-11-12 18:29:24">, 
     #<Comment id: 2, content: "Hi I am Ankita.This is my first comment!", user_id: 2, created_at: "2014-11-12 18:29:29", updated_at: "2014-11-12 18:29:29">,    
     #<Comment id: 3, content: "Hi I am John.This is my first comment!", user_id: 3, created_at: "2014-11-12 18:30:25", updated_at: "2014-11-12 18:30:25">]>

will fetch all records where user_id (of comments table) is equal to user.id (users table). Thus if you do

Comment.joins(:user).where("comments.user_id is null")

#=> <ActiveRecord::Relation []>

You will get a empty array as shown.

Moreover joins does not load the joined table in memory. Thus if you do

comment_1 = Comment.joins(:user).first

comment_1.user.age
#=>←[1m←[36mUser Load (0.0ms)←[0m  ←[1mSELECT "users".* FROM "users" WHERE "users"."id" = ? ORDER BY "users"."id" ASC LIMIT 1←[0m  [["id", 1]]
#=> 24

As you see, comment_1.user.age will fire a database query again in the background to get the results

Includes:

:includes performs a left outer join between the two tables. Thus

Comment.includes(:user)

#=><ActiveRecord::Relation [#<Comment id: 1, content: "Hi I am Aaditi.This is my first comment!", user_id: 1, created_at: "2014-11-12 18:29:24", updated_at: "2014-11-12 18:29:24">,
   #<Comment id: 2, content: "Hi I am Ankita.This is my first comment!", user_id: 2, created_at: "2014-11-12 18:29:29", updated_at: "2014-11-12 18:29:29">,
   #<Comment id: 3, content: "Hi I am John.This is my first comment!", user_id: 3, created_at: "2014-11-12 18:30:25", updated_at: "2014-11-12 18:30:25">,    
   #<Comment id: 4, content: "Hi This is an anonymous comment!", user_id: nil, created_at: "2014-11-12 18:31:02", updated_at: "2014-11-12 18:31:02">]>

will result in a joined table with all the records from comments table. Thus if you do

Comment.includes(:user).where("comment.user_id is null")
#=> #<ActiveRecord::Relation [#<Comment id: 4, content: "Hi This is an anonymous comment!", user_id: nil, created_at: "2014-11-12 18:31:02", updated_at: "2014-11-12 18:31:02">]>

it will fetch records where comments.user_id is nil as shown.

Moreover includes loads both the tables in the memory. Thus if you do

comment_1 = Comment.includes(:user).first

comment_1.user.age
#=> 24

As you can notice comment_1.user.age simply loads the result from memory without firing a database query in the background.