Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

Better, Faster, Cheaper?

Shortcut joins seem to be one of the more misunderstood features of Designer. They should not be used to resolve loops; that is not their function. They are supposed to be used to take shortcuts, thus the name. 🙂 They can make your queries faster, certainly, as they allow you to drop tables from the query. But there are limits as to how they can be used.

As a designer I almost always wait to the last step (or nearly so) to add shortcut joins. Here is the most important point about shortcut joins, in my opinion: If a universe isn’t working without them, adding shortcut joins does not fix any problems. In fact, it may only make them worse. I covered shortcut joins in a fairly detailed fashion in my most recent conference presentation. I am working on a series of posts to supplement the presentation slides and those will hopefully be ready soon.