SQL performance on LEFT OUTER JOIN vs NOT EXISTS

Joe's link is a good starting point. Quassnoi covers this too.

In general, if your fields are properly indexed, OR if you expect to filter out more records (i.e. have a lots of rows EXIST in the subquery) NOT EXISTS will perform better.

EXISTS and NOT EXISTS both short circuit - as soon as a record matches the criteria it's either included or filtered out and the optimizer moves on to the next record.

LEFT JOIN will join ALL RECORDS regardless of whether they match or not, then filter out all non-matching records. If your tables are large and/or you have multiple JOIN criteria, this can be very very resource intensive.

I normally try to use NOT EXISTS and EXISTS where possible. For SQL Server, IN and NOT IN are semantically equivalent and may be easier to write. These are among the only operators you will find in SQL Server that are guaranteed to short circuit.

Personally, I think that this one gets a big old, "It Depends". I've seen instances where each method has outperformed the other.

Your best bet is to test both and see which performs better. If it's a situation where the tables will always be small and performance isn't as crucial then I'd just go with whichever is the clearest to you (that's usually NOT EXISTS for most people) and move on.