Just to throw my 2 cents in here...
  1. Yes, they are absolutely equivalent.
  2. I have never seen the verbose syntax (INNER|LEFT|RIGHT|FULL JOIN) used in a professional, production system, probably because Oracle prior to 9i didn't support it. (I had completely forgotten that it existed.)
  3. If you can limit one of the tables on an indexed column before joining, it may be faster. So in your example, if eps_people_roles.ep is indexed, you should do this: 
    SELECT people.firstname, people.lastname, role.name
FROM people, roles, eps_people_roles
WHERE eps_people_roles.ep = 1
    AND (
        eps_people_roles.role = roles.id
        AND eps_people_roles.person = people.id
    )

    [download]
Update
If you have the JOIN keyword available and it makes the query easier to read, by all means use it. It was added to SQL syntax for a reason...

In reply to Re: SQL JOINs vs WHERE statements by bean
in thread SQL JOINs vs WHERE statements by Cody Pendant

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