When Should I Use SQL Joins Instead of Subqueries?

Have you tried searching for this online? I found a lot of information like a helpful Stack Overflow discussion. If you still have questions, it might help to clarify what specifically you're confused about or provide an example.

My recommendation is to prefer JOINs when you can. If you're using Microsoft SQL, consider looking into Common Table Expressions (CTEs) as well. Just remember, correlated subqueries might cause some issues with performance or data consistency when there are concurrent updates.

As a general guideline, if your result pulls data from various tables, that's a solid case for using a JOIN. But if your result depends on multiple tables but only pulls from one, then subqueries might be the way to go.

If your tables are related and they share a foreign key that connects to the output you need, go with a JOIN. It's usually the cleaner option for combining data from multiple tables.