CODEWITHSUNDEEP
sqlsql-serversql-server-2008t-sqlinner-join
ladenedge
ladenedge

Reputation: 13439

Is having an 'OR' in an INNER JOIN condition a bad idea?

In trying to improve the speed of an immensely slow query (several minutes on two tables with only ~50,000 rows each, on SQL Server 2008 if it matters), I narrowed down the problem to an OR in my inner join, as in:

SELECT mt.ID, mt.ParentID, ot.MasterID
  FROM dbo.MainTable AS mt
  INNER JOIN dbo.OtherTable AS ot ON ot.ParentID = mt.ID
                                  OR ot.ID = mt.ParentID

I changed this to (what I hope is) an equivalent pair of left joins, shown here:

SELECT mt.ID, mt.ParentID,
   CASE WHEN ot1.MasterID IS NOT NULL THEN
      ot1.MasterID ELSE
      ot2.MasterID END AS MasterID
  FROM dbo.MainTable AS mt
  LEFT JOIN dbo.OtherTable AS ot1 ON ot1.ParentID = mt.ID
  LEFT JOIN dbo.OtherTable AS ot2 ON ot2.ID = mt.ParentID
  WHERE ot1.MasterID IS NOT NULL OR ot2.MasterID IS NOT NULL

.. and the query now runs in about a second!

Is it generally a bad idea to put an OR in a join condition? Or am I just unlucky somehow in the layout of my tables?

Upvotes: 135

Views: 195831

Answers (3)

Mitul Panchal
Mitul Panchal

Reputation: 632

You can use UNION ALL instead

SELECT mt.ID, mt.ParentID, ot.MasterID
FROM dbo.MainTable AS mt
UNION ALL
SELECT mt.ID, mt.ParentID, ot.MasterID
FROM dbo.OtherTable AS ot

Upvotes: -1

Enes Okullu
Enes Okullu

Reputation: 340

I use following code for get different result from condition That worked for me.

Select A.column, B.column
FROM TABLE1 A
INNER JOIN
TABLE2 B
ON A.Id = (case when (your condition) then b.Id else (something) END)

Upvotes: 11

Quassnoi
Quassnoi

Reputation: 425723

This kind of JOIN is not optimizable to a HASH JOIN or a MERGE JOIN.

It can be expressed as a concatenation of two resultsets:

SELECT  *
FROM    maintable m
JOIN    othertable o
ON      o.parentId = m.id
UNION
SELECT  *
FROM    maintable m
JOIN    othertable o
ON      o.id = m.parentId

, each of them being an equijoin, however, SQL Server's optimizer is not smart enough to see it in the query you wrote (though they are logically equivalent).

Upvotes: 146

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