[websiteguy]

(disclosure - I am the author of this article) I am not sure about "faster", but it is more scalable and more flexible - especially considering that the datasets to be "joined" are small, page-sized datasets. We have a lot of different content types, with a central member database. Not having to have all of our content on one machine and not having the memory demand of doing joins allows us to scale more easily. This is not to say we "never" do joins (our member database has multiple tables), it is a matter of find the most appropriate modularity.