I’ve heard this question a lot, but never thought to blog about the answer. “Is there a performance difference between putting the JOIN conditions in the ON clause or the WHERE clause in MySQL?” No, there’s no difference. The following queries are algebraically equivalent inside MySQL and will have the same execution plan.
1 2 3 4 5 | SELECT * FROM A, B WHERE A.ID = B.ID; SELECT * FROM A JOIN B ON A.ID = B.ID; SELECT * FROM A JOIN B USING(ID); |
Personally, [...]

