Join vs. sub-query

Question

I am an old-school MySQL user and have always preferred JOIN over sub-query. But nowadays everyone uses sub-query, and I hate it; I don\'t know why.

Answer 1

MSDN Documentation for SQL Server says

Many Transact-SQL statements that include subqueries can be alternatively formulated as joins. Other questions can be posed only with subqueries. In Transact-SQL, there is usually no performance difference between a statement that includes a subquery and a semantically equivalent version that does not. However, in some cases where existence must be checked, a join yields better performance. Otherwise, the nested query must be processed for each result of the outer query to ensure elimination of duplicates. In such cases, a join approach would yield better results.

so if you need something like

select * from t1 where exists select * from t2 where t2.parent=t1.id

try to use join instead. In other cases, it makes no difference.

I say: Creating functions for subqueries eliminate the problem of cluttter and allows you to implement additional logic to subqueries. So I recommend creating functions for subqueries whenever possible.

Clutter in code is a big problem and the industry has been working on avoiding it for decades.