[OT] large db question about no joins

[Paul Rubin]

Daniel Fetchinson <fetchinson at googlemail.com> writes:
> Hi folks, I've come across many times the claim that 'joins are bad'
> for large databases because they don't scale.

I think that means joins with very large result sets and lots of
different values being matched on between the two tables.  The usual
use of a join in, say, web server programming, is to look up something
with just a few results and just one value being matched.  That scales
pretty well.