>>>I remembered this message #1042994 thus I thought since then that JOIN happens first.
>>
>>It might in Joins involving only a handful of records, which is an eficient filter in itself, but the (for my queries at least) standard way of optimizing is reducing set size via index.
>
>It would amaze me if it were done otherwise. The faster you can reduce the number of records being processed, the faster the overall query will be.

Imagine a join a to b, b to c. Now if table c has only one record, chances are that the operation is faster if you join b to c first and then check if filters can reduce the join from a to joined intermediate...

but tis is IMHO a fringe case.

regards

thomas