Comparing Equivalent Queries
As you’ve seen in this chapter and the preceding one, you can express the same query in different ways (different syntax, same semantics). To expand on this point, I’ve written the same query six semantically equivalent ways. Each of the statements in Listing 8.60 lists the authors who have written (or co-written) at least one book. See Figure 8.60 for the result.
The first two queries (inner joins) will run at the same speed as one another. Of the third through sixth queries (which use subqueries), the last one probably is the worst performer. The DBMS can—and probably will—stop processing the other subqueries as soon as it encounters a single matching value. But the subquery in the last statement has to count all ...
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