Oh you're right about that. What may not be entirely obvious though is that oftentimes 1 query can be far slower than 3 queries. In a lot of cases, that one que

Oh you're right about that. What may not be entirely obvious though is that oftentimes 1 query can be far slower than 3 queries. In a lot of cases, that one query would have to do joins against multiple tables– I've personally seen speedups of 20x or more by just decomposing a single complex query into a few smaller and more focused queries.