sql - LEFT JOIN vs. multiple SELECT statements

Question

I am working on someone else's PHP code and seeing this pattern over and over:

(pseudocode)

result = SELECT blah1, blah2, foreign_key FROM foo WHERE key=bar

if foreign_key > 0  
  other_result = SELECT something FROM foo2 WHERE key=foreign_key  
end

The code needs to branch if there is no related row in the other table, but couldn't this be done better by doing a LEFT JOIN in a single SELECT statement? Am I missing some performance benefit? Portability issue? Or am I just nitpicking?

Answer 1

This is definitely wrong. You are going over the wire a second time for no reason. DBs are very fast at their problem space. Joining tables is one of those and you'll see more of a performance degradation from the second query then the join. Unless your tablespace is hundreds of millions of records, this is not a good idea.