Yeah, you're right... It's way better to do expensive joins on the database where horizontal scalability is just a fantasy than in the shared-nothing www frontends that can be duplicated in clusters ad infinitum.

If you're building SomeSimpleBasicSite.com and you do this, you're probably a bad programmer. If you're truly facing scalability problems, it's table stakes.

Based on your comments in this thread you're out of your depth, man.