title: CTE vs. IN clause performance
body: <p>Alright SQL Server Gurus, fire up your analyzers.</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>I have a list of titles in application memory (250 or so).</li>
  <li>I have a database table "books" with greater than a million records, one of the columns of the table is "title" and is of type nvarchar.</li>
  <li>the "books" table has another column called "ISBN"</li>
  <li>books.title is not a primary key, is not unique, but is indexed.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>So I'd like to know which is more efficient:</p>
  
  <pre><code>WITH titles AS (select 'Catcher and the Rye' as Title
                  union all 'Harry Potter ...'
                  ...
                  union all 'The World Is Flat')
  
  select ISBN from books, titles where books.title = titles.title;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>OR:</p>
  
  <pre><code>select ISBN from books where title in ('Catcher and the Rye','Harry Potter',...,'The World Is Flat');
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>OR:</p>
  
  <pre><code>???
  </code></pre>