Here i need help with joins. I have two tables say articles and users. while displaying articles i need to display also the user info like username, etc. So will it be better if i just use joins to join the articles and user tables to fetch the user info while displaying articles like below.

SELECT a.*,u.username,u.id FROM articles a JOIN users u ON u.id=a.user_id

OR can this one in php. First i get the articles with below sql

SELECT * FROM articles

Then after i get the articles array i loop though it and get the user info inside each loop like below

SELECT username, id FROM users WHERE id='".$articles->user_id."';

Which is better can i have explanation on why too. Thank you for any reply or views