Is it better to use INNER JOIN or EXISTS to find belonging to several in m2m relation?

Question

Given m2m relation: items-categories I have three tables:

• items,
• categories and
• items_categories that hold references to both

I want to find an item belonging to all given category sets:

Find Item 
belonging to a category in [1,3,6] 
and belonging to a category in [7,8,4] 
and belonging to a category in [12,66,42]
and ...

There are two ways I can think of to accomplish this in mySQL.

OPTION A: INNER JOIN:

SELECT id from items 
INNER JOIN category c1 ON (item.id = c1.item_id)
INNER JOIN category c2 ON (item.id = c2.item_id)
INNER JOIN category c3 ON (item.id = c3.item_id)
...
WHERE
c1.category_id IN [1,3,6] AND
c2.category_id IN [7,8,4] AND
c3.category_id IN [12,66,42] AND
...;

OPTION B: EXISTS:

SELECT id from items
WHERE
EXISTS(SELECT category_id FROM category WHERE category.item_id = id AND category_id in [1,3,6] AND
EXISTS(SELECT category_id FROM category WHERE category.item_id = id AND category_id in [7,8,4] AND
EXISTS(SELECT category_id FROM category WHERE category.item_id = id AND category_id in [12,66,42] AND
...;

Both options work. The question is: Which is the fastest / most optimal for large item table? Or is there an OPTION C I am missing?

Answer 1

OPTION A

JOIN has an advantage over EXIST , because it will more efficiently use the indices, especially in case of large tables