Left Join outperforming Inner Join?

Question

I\'ve been profiling some queries in an application I\'m working on, and I came across a query that was retrieving more rows than necessary, the result set being trimmed dow

Answer 1

Table cardinality has an influence on the query optimizer. I guess small tables as you have make the inner join the more complex operation. As soon as you have more records than the DB server is willing to keep in memory, the inner join will probably begin to outperform the left join.