Just to push against the crowd here pooh poohing client-side joins: this is a standard technique for scaling when you are stuck (for the time being) with a RDB

Just to push against the crowd here pooh poohing client-side joins: this is a standard technique for scaling when you are stuck (for the time being) with a RDB and is definitely not in general "horrible". It does not mean pulling entire tables to the client then joining there. It means splitting a query that in effect walks down a chain of pointers (FKs) between tables into separate client-initiated queries. There are several benefits to this: 1. makes the design "nosql-ready" for when you design out the RDB. 2. Makes all DB queries inherently indexed and quick, allowing easy perf analysis (any non-quick query must be a bug) and alleviating connection pool starvation issues. 3. Prevents pesky devs from adding expensive queries under the radar. 4. allows more ready deployment of caching solutions. 5. recognizes that client resources scale with the number of clients, and are paid for by the client while RDB resources generally scale with difficulty and $$$, and are paid for by you.