Is a join faster with 5 tables joined together Or 5 separate queries?
Look at it this way...  There is  a lot of overhead in each SELECT:

Round trip between client and server
Allocate a thread to work on the query
Parse the SQL
Optimize it
Perform it  (The meat!)
Send the results back

In some experiments, I have seen the &quot;overhead&quot; be 90% of the work.  5 queries takes nearly 5 times the overhead.