I definitely would NOT hardcode the levels into your code.

If you are going to use the %levels in multiple places in you code then you might want to experiment with SELECT'ing the levels into %level and using that as a cache. Keeping them cached would probably be worth it from a performance standpoint if doing so will actually let you make fewer calls to the database, but probably not worth it if it just means make making the same number (albiet shorter) calls to the db.

Don't automatically take the caching route even if the performance gains are tremendous, though. Maintainability is just as important or even more important than performance. You don't want to have to do kludges or make hard-to-change code in the name of performance.

In the sample code that you provided, most of your overhead is going to come from creating db connections and cursors. The overhead from the join is going to be miniscule compared to that.

Hanlon's Razor - "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"

In reply to Re: hash or tables... by Art_XIV
in thread hash or tables... by kiat

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