> As for speed, either one might be faster in a particular > situation.
After fixing a mistake in my testing and learning from Tom's example I generated queries against the OP's test data which produce identical results, and I'm finding no significant difference between run times for the two versions. The OP should definitely try both against the real tables.
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-Kevin
After trying both against the real tables DISTINCT ON seems to be about two orders of magnitude faster than the other options.