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Databases SQL Reporting by Example Day 1: Joining Tables 7th Grade Science

cte vs join performance

Which method we should prefer while writing SQL queries, CTE or JOIN?

Can you elaborate a little?

1 Answer

It depends on what you're wanting to do. In my day to day work I setup CTE's if I want to have a specific set of data that I can query from, otherwise I do a join.

I read somewhere that CTEs are loaded into RAM and can be faster than a join, but I've also read conflicting information in some forums.