Can I get better performance using a JOIN or using EXISTS?

Question

I have two tables Institutions and Results and I want to see if there are any results for institutions that way I can exclude the ones that don\'t have results.

Can

Answer 1

Actually, from your vague description of the problem, it sounds to me like a NOT IN query is the most obvious way to code it:

SELECT *
  FROM Institutions
  WHERE InstitutionID NOT IN (
     SELECT DISTINCT InstitutionID
       FROM Results
     )