When you're spoiled with Oracle's fabulous query transformation capabilities and its really well-done cost-based optimiser, then you might forget how difficult SQL query tuning used to be in the "old days" or with those less sophisticated databases. Here's a really nice explanation of the various means of implementing an ANTI-JOIN in MySQL: http://explainextended.com/2009/09/18/not-in-vs-not-exists-vs-left-join-is-null-mysql/