[wvenable]

I've significantly improved the performance of queries by undoing someone who did #5 when it wasn't strictly needed. Sometimes breaking a query into many smaller queries is significantly less efficient than giving the query optimizer the entire query and letting it find the best route to the data.

If you've done #5 without doing #6 then you'll likely not see that you're doing something not optimal. My advice is avoid premature optimization and do things the most straight forward way first and then only optimize if needed. Most importantly, don't code in SQL procedurally -- you're describing the data you want not giving the engine instructions on how to get it.