TSQL efficiency - INNER JOIN replaced by EXISTS - tsql

Question

Can the following be rewritten to be more efficient?
I would use EXISTS if I didn't need fields from country but I do need those fields, and am not sure how to write this to make it more efficient.
SELECT distinct
p.ProvinceID,
p.Abbv as RegionCode,
p.name as RegionName,
cn.Code as CountryCode,
cn.Name as CountryName
FROM dbo.provinces AS p
INNER JOIN dbo.Countries AS cn ON p.CountryID = cn.CountryID
INNER JOIN dbo.Cities c on c.ProvinceID = p.ProvinceID
INNER JOIN dbo.Listings AS l ON l.CityID = c.CityID
WHERE l.IsActive = 1 AND l.IsApproved = 1

Answer 1

There are two things to note:
You're joining to dbo.Listings which results in many records, so you need to use DISTINCT (usually an expensive operator)
For any tables with columns not in the select you can move into an EXISTS (but the query planner effectively does this for you anyway)
So try this:
SELECT
p.ProvinceID,
p.Abbv as RegionCode,
p.name as RegionName,
cn.Code as CountryCode,
cn.Name as CountryName
FROM dbo.provinces AS p
INNER JOIN
dbo.Countries AS cn
ON p.CountryID = cn.CountryID
WHERE EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM
dbo.Listings l
INNER JOIN dbo.Cities c
on l.CityID = c.CityID
WHERE c.ProvinceID = p.ProvinceID
AND l.IsActive = 1 AND l.IsApproved = 1
)
Check the query plans before and after - the query planner might be smart enough to do this anyway, but you have removed your distinct

Answer 2

The following will often perform even better by providing the optimizer more useful information:
SELECT
p.ProvinceID,
p.Abbv as RegionCode,
p.name as RegionName,
cn.Code as CountryCode,
cn.Name as CountryName
FROM dbo.provinces AS p
INNER JOIN
dbo.Countries AS cn
ON p.CountryID = cn.CountryID
INNER JOIN (
SELECT
p.ProvinceID
FROM
dbo.Listings l
INNER JOIN dbo.Cities c
on l.CityID = c.CityID
WHERE l.IsActive = 1 AND l.IsApproved = 1
GROUP BY
p.ProvinceID
) list
on list.ProvinceID = p.ProvinceID