I have a situation where because of some business requirement i often filter queries using an in statement that checks to see if a value is in a group of elements.
That group of elements is fairly small; between 2-10. So I was wondering if it is more efficient to do a
and (value = ? or value = ? or value = ?)
rather than
and value in elements(?)

if you check elements in database EXISTS is better than IN, but if you do it in java i think that isn't important - compiler will optimize it

well that was what I was hoping, if it auto optimizes it it makes my life easy