What describes a Natural Join in relational databases?

A Natural Join is defined as a method of combining rows from two or more tables based on the equality of their columns that have the same names across those tables. What makes this join "natural" is that it automatically matches the columns based on these common names, and it only includes rows in the result where the values in those columns link the tables together. This means that it helps retrieve records that are conceptually related through shared attributes.

In a practical sense, when you perform a Natural Join, the database engine looks for all common column names in the participating tables and creates a combined row set only where those columns' values are equal. This results in an output that is free from duplicate columns from the tables involved, making it easier to analyze the data without redundancy. Thus, this feature of utilizing matching column names and values is what fundamentally characterizes a Natural Join.