>Thanks for the advice Sergey. I know that test are the only real way to determine, but the project I'm working on right now has so many of these SELECT statements for a single process that I was just looking for a "default" way (if you will) to formulate these queries.
>
>If JOINS are generally faster I'll use JOINS and only go testing different SELECT structures when something doesn't seem up to par.


James,

Don't forget that appropriate indexes required for optimization.