MySQL – Can All Joins Be Rewritten to Subqueries?

How about creating views for joins that are used repeatedly ?

For example:

create view my_view as 
select names.id as name_id, names.type_id, names.action_id, ...
from names join types on names.type_id = type.id
           join actions on names.action_id = actions.id;

In your particular case, I would use LEFT JOIN instead. Why?

In a LEFT JOIN query, you can dictate what keys you want and the order you want to fetch and join, while INNER JOIN lets the MySQL Query Optimizer decide which is best. In some cases, the EXPLAIN plan may look horrible but still give good performance.

Instead of

SELECT *
FROM table
INNER JOIN (
SELECT id
FROM table
LIMIT 10 OFFSET 100000)
AS results USING(id);

flip the query to have the keys first

SELECT B.*
FROM (SELECT id FROM table LIMIT 10 OFFSET 100000) A
LEFT JOIN table B USING (id);

From there, you can control the order by inside in subquery A

SELECT B.*
FROM (SELECT id FROM table LIMIT 10 OFFSET 100000 ORDER BY ...) A
LEFT JOIN table B USING (id);

or after USING (id)

SELECT B.*
FROM (SELECT id FROM table LIMIT 10 OFFSET 100000) A
LEFT JOIN table B USING (id)  ORDER BY ...;

This way, you should be able to navigate (or paginate) through the keys before locating actual data. To show this using empirical evidence, see my StackOverflow post (Fetching a Single Row from Join Table) on using LEFT JOIN with primary keys.

Give it a Try !!!