SQL Joins Vs SQL Subqueries (Performance)?

Well, I believe it's an "Old but Gold" question. The answer is: "It depends!". The performances are such a delicate subject that it would be too much silly to say: "Never use subqueries, always join". In the following links, you'll find some basic best practices that I have found to be very helpful:

• Optimizing Subqueries
• Optimizing Subqueries with Semijoin Transformations
• Rewriting Subqueries as Joins

I have a table with 50000 elements, the result i was looking for was 739 elements.

My query at first was this:

SELECT  p.id,
    p.fixedId,
    p.azienda_id,
    p.categoria_id,
    p.linea,
    p.tipo,
    p.nome
FROM prodotto p
WHERE p.azienda_id = 2699 AND p.anno = (
    SELECT MAX(p2.anno) 
    FROM prodotto p2 
    WHERE p2.fixedId = p.fixedId 
)

and it took 7.9s to execute.

My query at last is this:

SELECT  p.id,
    p.fixedId,
    p.azienda_id,
    p.categoria_id,
    p.linea,
    p.tipo,
    p.nome
FROM prodotto p
WHERE p.azienda_id = 2699 AND (p.fixedId, p.anno) IN
(
    SELECT p2.fixedId, MAX(p2.anno)
    FROM prodotto p2
    WHERE p.azienda_id = p2.azienda_id
    GROUP BY p2.fixedId
)

and it took 0.0256s

Good SQL, good.

I would EXPECT the first query to be quicker, mainly because you have an equivalence and an explicit JOIN. In my experience IN is a very slow operator, since SQL normally evaluates it as a series of WHERE clauses separated by "OR" (WHERE x=Y OR x=Z OR...).

As with ALL THINGS SQL though, your mileage may vary. The speed will depend a lot on indexes (do you have indexes on both ID columns? That will help a lot...) among other things.

The only REAL way to tell with 100% certainty which is faster is to turn on performance tracking (IO Statistics is especially useful) and run them both. Make sure to clear your cache between runs!