Bert Wagner takes a look at one of the lesser appreciated tricks in performance tuning:
I had a great question submitted to me (thank you Brandman!) that I thought would make for a good blog post:
…I’ve been wondering if it really matters from a performance standpoint where I start my queries. For example, if I join from A-B-C, would I be better off starting at table B and then going to A & C?
The short answer: Yes. And no.
One of my favorite query tuning books is SQL Tuning by Dan Tow. Parts of it are rather dated at this point—like pretty much anything involving a rule-based optimizer—but the gist still works well. What it comes down to is finding the best single table from which to drive your query (based on table size, filters, etc.) and selecting the appropriate join order afterward. It’s fairly time-consuming effort, but for the 0.5-1% of queries which really need it, it can be the difference between an awful plan and a good one.