I think that Brian may have a cross-product (Cartesian) join confused with an Outer Join.
A cross-product join results in as many rows as the products of the row counts for each table row selected from. This is unfortunately the naive syntax for SQL and almost never what you actually want.
An Outer join has an anchor table which is joined on a matching query with null values returned when the anchor table can't pair up a row in the query with a corresponding row from the secondary table. As opposed to an Inner join, where only the anchor table rows that had corresponding matches with secondary table rows are returned.
And yes, you can very definitely join several tables together in a single SQL query. I have to do so far more often than I could wish, and it's one of the advantages of using an ORM system instead of raw
JDBC - you don't have to kill yourself defining the join logic properly.
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.