[Amezarak]

I would suggest that there's potentially something you need to look at with your database schema - a couple dozen joins shouldn't be causing any problems you have to think about.

Part of this is because of the way a well-normalized database is organized. Most databases have a few large tables and many smaller tables. So in the general case, most of your joins will be against smaller tables. Joins with larger tables are usually very fast, as long as the fields you join on are indexed (and you're not doing a CROSS JOIN or something.) The other thing that helps (which it sounds like you did by "nesting related joins") is to always think about limiting (filtering) the datasets you're joining against at as many stages as possible; that way you're always doing the least amount of work necessary, and it's usually conceptually simpler to read and understand.

As others have said, most databases do have index hinting as part of the query language. However, in my (long) experience, you should almost never use it. Index hints should be a huge code smell.

[kimdotcom]

I use UUIDs as primary keys, you insensitive clod!