hi all,
i am just asking what is the effiecient way of the followed exambles
1-
select * from
table1 join table2 on table1.id=table2.id

or
2-
select * from
table1,table2
where table1.id=table2.id




Ahmed Ali
Software Developer

__________________
Ahmed Ali
Senior Software Developer

These produce exactly the same query plan.

The former is the newer style, SQL-92 JOIN syntax, where the latter is "old style" notation.

There is no accounting for taste, but I prefer the newer style, as it separates the predicates used to define JOIN criteria from WHERE predicates used to select rows from the resultant JOINs. If I have a complex WHERE clause, I like to keep it focused on row selection rather than JOIN definition.

The old style begins to show problems when used in OUTER JOINS (*= syntax). There, true ambiguities can result depending on the order of WHERE clause evaluation. Removing these ambiguities was the main reason why the new syntax was proposed.

Jeff Mason
Custom Apps, Inc.
www.custom-apps.com

thx , so there is no performance issue
else the order for where clause in the old style



Ahmed Ali
Software Developer

I have fond some information, I beleive off the MSDN site, where it point blank says "you will get better performance by using the new standard"

When we did our conversion from Sybaset to SQL2k - this was one of the areas we addressed - was to consider changing these old styles to new styles durring our conversion.

Unless I'm mistaken, I beleive we had some test cases that proved the need to convert to the new standard for performance reasons.

_________________________
Joe Horton
Database Developer / Software Engineer
WISHA/Legal Services Software Development
Department of Labor and Industries
Voice (360) 902-5928 fax (360) 902-6200

I'd love to see that reference, or examples of queries which perform differently.

I certainly haven't done an exhaustive analysis, but every time I do look, I can see no difference in the query plans between old-style and new-style JOIN syntax. My bible, "Inside SQL Server 2000", states that there is no difference in performance and that "...behind the scenes, the operations are the same...".

Whether there was or wasn't a difference, I would still advocate the new style - it's just more readable IMO.

Jeff Mason
Custom Apps, Inc.
www.custom-apps.com

here is quote from (pretty sure I found other sources too):
http://sql-server-performance.com/rd_query_tuning.asp

"Use the new ANSI JOIN syntax instead of the old style joins. The new join syntax has a slight performance advantage over the old way of using the WHERE clause for a join. The new syntax also tends to have better readability and should become the norm in your Transact-SQL coding."


_________________________
Joe Horton
Database Developer / Software Engineer
WISHA/Legal Services Software Development
Department of Labor and Industries
Voice (360) 902-5928 fax (360) 902-6200

I read something somewhere that said that in SQL 2K there was no performance advantage to the new format- however it's expected that will change in the future releases of SQL Server.

Hal Levy
Web Developer, PDI Inc.

NOT a Wiley/Wrox Employee