i agree with bruno....unless you are running on GAE. in that case join's are not supported and are implemented as additional queries under the covers. in the GAE case i extend my auth table so that i don't have to run so many queries.
db[auth.settings.table_user_name] is better than db.auth_user so that if you change the name of the auth_user table using the settings it will change here as well. prior to GAE namespaces i was changing the names of tables so they would not overlap between applications. cfh
