If I have 2 tables employee and department
1) to join data at the server side
SELECT * FROM employee CROSS JOIN department;
we use only one connection here to grab the data
2) to join data at client side we would grab the 2 tables and use 2 connections
SELECT * FROM employee;
and store it in an array and also
SELECT * FROM department;
and store it in another array and and merge the 2 arrays by programming at the client side using for example Javascript.
the second method may be more complex but the advantages is that you could store the employee table on one sever and the department table on another server by this you decrease the load on your own server and make the each client machine do its work
But I'm asking if I want to join 2000 table Which would be better in performance and faster: to do joins at the client side or at the server side?