Optimize subquery (without using Select inside Where clause)?

I am trying to see if there is a way to optimize bottom T-SQL code.

This is how previous co-worker wrote, and I am not sure if there is a better way to write because it has Select within the Where clause (subquery?).

select 
    Employee_Number,    
    DateLoad 
from dbo.table1 as a
where DateLoad = (
    select min(DateLoad)
    from dbo.table2 as b 
    where a.Employee_Number = b.Employee_Number
)

Solution

This still uses a nested SELECT, but not in the WHERE clause and should run faster:

SELECT Employee_Number, DateLoad
FROM (
    select a.Employee_number, a.DateLoad
       , row_number() over (partition by a.Employee_Number
                            order by b.DateLoad) rn
    from Table1 A
    inner join Table2 B on B.Employee_Number = A.Employee_Number 
        and a.DateLoad = b.DateLoad
) t
WHERE rn = 1

Depending on the data there might also be a way to do this using GROUP BY, without any nesting:

SELECT A.Employee_Number, Min(B.DateLoad) DateLoad
FROM Table1 A
INNER JOIN Table2 B ON B.Employee_Number = A.Employee_Number 
    AND a.DateLoad = b.DateLoad
GROUP BY A.Employee_Number

But I'm not 100% certain this will be functionally equivalent to the original. You'll want to check carefully to be sure it works reliably on your data.

The main thing to understand is a JOIN is almost always faster than a correlated nested SELECT ("correlated" mean "per row" in this context), and not by just a little. The only exception I'm aware of is using an EXISTS() predicate instead of an exclusion join.