What is the difference between UNION and UNION ALL ?

Both UNION and UNION ALL is used to select information from structurally similar tables. That means corresponding columns specified in the union should have same data type. For example, in the above query, if FIRST_NAME is DOUBLE and LAST_NAME is STRING above query wont work. Since the data type of both the columns are VARCHAR, union is made possible. Difference between UNION and UNION ALL is that , UNION query return only distinct values.