I haven't much experience with stored procedures but I have seen views cause load on a DB. Almost every app I have worked on had a database that were several t

I haven't much experience with stored procedures but I have seen views cause load on a DB. Almost every app I have worked on had a database that were several tables for a single object and several for the where clause. As good as the table layout seemed to be in terms of logic it just led to slow queries like you said joins and sub-queries come at a cost. Then again, I have seen clients balk at the idea of fixing the database and insist on a more unreadable yet performant query. But its their time and money so I don't fight back. Sometimes, a really good DBA is what a project needs because so few programmers are good at performant design.