Re: in (id_1,id_2, ...) or more select statements or

[matthew crowley]

Do the join. As long as your tables are indexed properly, this should return VERY fast. Be careful about the limit statement when doing joins or grouping. In some databases, not necessarily mysql, limiting the rows returned can sometimes give you unexpected results. I would pull the entire result into an array, and only show the first 20, next 20 like that. If your result set is huge, consider just looping through the rows as they come back and only storing the ones you want in an array.