Read this SQL tutorial to learn when to use SELECT, JOIN, subselects and UNION to access multiple tables with a single statement. It’s sometimes difficult to know which SQL syntax to use when ...
I've said it before and I'll say it again: If you want to speed up your application, don't look at your code, look at your data access. The two slowest things you can do in application development are ...
A common SQL habit is to use SELECT * on a query, because it’s tedious to list all the columns you need. Plus, sometimes those columns may change over time, so why not just do things the easy way? But ...