Question

I’m a MySQL query noobie so I’m sure this is a question with an obvious answer.

But, I was looking at these two queries. Will they return different result sets? I understand that the sorting process would commence differently, but I believe they will return the same results with the first query being slightly more efficient?

Query 1: HAVING, then AND

SELECT user_id   
FROM forum_posts  
GROUP BY user_id 
    HAVING COUNT(id) >= 100   
    AND user_id NOT IN (SELECT user_id FROM banned_users)

Query 2: WHERE, then HAVING

SELECT user_id   
FROM forum_posts 
WHERE user_id NOT IN(SELECT user_id FROM banned_users) 
GROUP BY user_id 
    HAVING COUNT(id) >= 100   

Answer 1

Actually the first query will be less efficient (HAVING applied after WHERE).
UPDATE

Some pseudo code to illustrate how your queries are executed ([very] simplified version).
First query:
1. SELECT user_id FROM forum_posts
2. SELECT user_id FROM banned_user
3. Group, count, etc.
4. Exclude records from the first result set if they are presented in the second

Second query
1. SELECT user_id FROM forum_posts
2. SELECT user_id FROM banned_user
3. Exclude records from the first result set if they are presented in the second
4. Group, count, etc.

The order of steps 1,2 is not important, mysql can choose whatever it thinks is better. The important difference is in steps 3,4. Having is applied after GROUP BY. Grouping is usually more expensive than joining (excluding records can be considering as join operation in this case), so the fewer records it has to group, the better performance.