MySQL JOIN Abuse? How bad can it get?

Question

I\'ve been reading a lot about Relational Databases using many JOIN statements on every SELECT. However, I\'ve been wondering if there\'s any performance problem on the long run

Answer 1

Some bright person once said:

Normalize until it hurts, denormalize until it works!

It all depends on the type of joins, and the join conditions, but there are nothing wrong with them. Joins ON table1.PK = table2.FK are very efficient.