Condition within JOIN or WHERE

Is there any difference (performance, best-practice, etc…) between putting a condition in the JOIN clause vs. the WHERE clause?

For example…

-- Condition in JOIN
SELECT *
FROM dbo.Customers AS CUS
INNER JOIN dbo.Orders AS ORD 
ON CUS.CustomerID = ORD.CustomerID
AND CUS.FirstName = 'John'

-- Condition in WHERE
SELECT *
FROM dbo.Customers AS CUS
INNER JOIN dbo.Orders AS ORD 
ON CUS.CustomerID = ORD.CustomerID
WHERE CUS.FirstName = 'John'

Which do you prefer (and perhaps why)?

Answer

The relational algebra allows interchangeability of the predicates in the WHERE clause and the INNER JOIN, so even INNER JOIN queries with WHERE clauses can have the predicates rearrranged by the optimizer so that they may already be excluded during the JOIN process.

I recommend you write the queries in the most readable way possible.

Sometimes this includes making the INNER JOIN relatively “incomplete” and putting some of the criteria in the WHERE simply to make the lists of filtering criteria more easily maintainable.

For example, instead of:

SELECT *
FROM Customers c
INNER JOIN CustomerAccounts ca
    ON ca.CustomerID = c.CustomerID
    AND c.State = 'NY'
INNER JOIN Accounts a
    ON ca.AccountID = a.AccountID
    AND a.Status = 1

Write:

SELECT *
FROM Customers c
INNER JOIN CustomerAccounts ca
    ON ca.CustomerID = c.CustomerID
INNER JOIN Accounts a
    ON ca.AccountID = a.AccountID
WHERE c.State = 'NY'
    AND a.Status = 1

But it depends, of course.