Is it better to do multiple selects from multiple tables or 1 select of all your data from all the tables?

Question

I have multiple tables that data can be queried from with joins.

In regards to database performance:

Should I run multiple selects from multiple tables for the required data?

or

Should I write 1 select that uses a bunch of Joins to select the required data from all the tables at once?

EDIT:

The where clause I will be using for the select contains Indexed fields of the tables. It sounds like because of this, it will be faster to use 1 select statement with many joins. I will however still test the performance difference between the 2.

Thanks for all the great answers.

Answer 1

Just write one query with joins. If you are concerned about performance there are a number of options including:

• Creating indexes that will help the performance of your selects
• Create a persisted denormalized form of the data you want so you can query one table. This would most likely be an indexed view or another table.