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I have a Notes table with a uniqueidentifier column that I use as a FK for a variety of other tables in the database (don't worry, the uniqueidentifier columns on the other tables aren't clustered PKs). These other tables represent something of a hierarchy of business objects. As a simple representation, let's say I have two other tables:
In the display of a Lead in the application, I need to show all notes related to the lead, including those tagged to any Quote that belongs to that lead. I have two options as far as I can see — either a UNION ALL or several LEFT JOIN statements. Here's how they'd look:
SELECT N.*
FROM Notes N
JOIN Leads L ON N.TargetUniqueID = L.UniqueID
WHERE L.LeadID = @LeadID
UNION ALL
SELECT N.*
FROM Notes N
JOIN Quotes Q ON N.TargetUniqueID = Q.UniqueID
WHERE Q.LeadID = @LeadID
Or...
SELECT N.*
FROM Notes N
LEFT JOIN Leads L ON N.TargetUniqueID = L.UniqueID
LEFT JOIN Quotes Q ON N.TargetUniqueID = Q.UniqueID
WHERE L.LeadID = @LeadID OR Q.LeadID = @LeadID
In real life I have a total of five tables that the notes could be attached to, and that number could grow as the application grows. I already have non-clustered indexes set up on the uniqueidentifier columns I'm using, and SQL Profiler says I can't make any more improvements, but when I do a performance test on a realistically-sized test data set, I get the following numbers:
UNION ALL — 0.010 secLEFT JOIN — 0.744 secI had always heard that using UNION was bad, and that UNION ALL was only marginally better, but the performance numbers don't seem to bear that out. Granted, the UNION ALL SQL code might be more of a pain to maintain, but at that kind of performance difference it's probably worth it.
So is UNION ALL really better here or am I missing something on the LEFT JOIN code that is slowing things down?
644
Union will be faster, as it simply passes the first SELECT statement, and then parses the second SELECT statement and adds the results to the end of the output table.
In case there are a large number of rows in the tables and there is an index to use, INNER JOIN is generally faster than OUTER JOIN. Generally, an OUTER JOIN is slower than an INNER JOIN as it needs to return more number of records when compared to INNER JOIN.
TLDR: The most efficient join is also the simplest join, 'Relational Algebra'. If you wish to find out more on all the methods of joins, read further. Relational algebra is the most common way of writing a query and also the most natural way to do so.
The advantage of a join includes that it executes faster. The retrieval time of the query using joins almost always will be faster than that of a subquery. By using joins, you can maximize the calculation burden on the database i.e., instead of multiple queries using one join query.
The UNION ALL version would probably be satisfied quite easily by 2 index seeks. OR can lead to scans. What do the execution plans look like?
Also have you tried this to avoid accessing Notes twice?
;WITH J AS
(
SELECT UniqueID FROM Leads WHERE LeadID = @LeadID
UNION ALL
SELECT UniqueID FROM Quotes WHERE LeadID = @LeadID
)
SELECT N.* /*Don't use * though!*/
FROM Notes N
JOIN J ON N.TargetUniqueID = J.UniqueID
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