Re: which is best for JOIN approach

[Rick James]

LEFT has a semantic meaning. Decide whether you need it. Don't use LEFT unless you need it to get optional info from the 'righthand' table.

Run EXPLAIN SELECT on those two queries to see what (if any) difference there is.

In my experience, only one JOIN in a thousand needs parentheses. Virtually all cases are happy without them.

If you are trying to say

select ...
    from inform a
    left join (
        SELECT ... FROM infmrq b JOIN contact ec on b.id=ec.id) on b.id=a.id
              ) AS bec ON ...

then that is quite a different case. And it _probably_ has performance issues because of "LEFT JOIN ( SELECT ... )". Again, if you don't need LEFT, don't include it.