From: Chris W Date: August 25 2010 6:48pm Subject: To join or not to join? List-Archive: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql/222675 Message-Id: <4C756598.8000309@cox.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I need a single row from 2 different tables. It is rather trivial to create a join that will join these two tables and give me all the information I want in one query. It is also fairly easy to just execute two different queries with out any join and get the data I need. Since the both single table queries or the join query will always only return a single row, I was wondering if there was a performance hit doing it one way or the other. On one table the where clause is on the primary key on the other table there where clause is on a single column that is indexed but not unique. However in this situation it will be unique. I can't put a unique key on this field in the second table because there are other applications of the second table where I do need it to non unique. Hope that makes sense. Chris W