[failedengineer]

This makes my head and heart hurt to see so many people agreeing with this.

There's a right, and wrong, time for using left joins. "all the time" is the wrong time. If you need to join on all existing records, including null records, you need the trinary equality operation.

Also... there's a right join... if you're writing complex enough stuff long enough, you'll eventually hit a query where it's just easier to do the same thing you've been doing on the right side.

I can't say for sure, because it's implementation dependant, but this is going to slow down your results on larger data sets as well, since you won't be excluding joins (in memory) by excluding data (during the selects from individual tables)