I currently have a table with about 300,000 rows and 22 columns. One those columns is "category".

If "category" is one thing, then 6 of those rows are used; otherwise, they're NULL. About 65,000 rows match this category.

If "category" is another thing, then 5 other columns are used (not the same as the previous 6); otherwise, they're NULL. About 5,200 rows match this category.

If "category" is anything besides those 2 things, then 11 of those 22 columns are NULL. So about 230,000 of those 300,000 rows have 11 columns that are NULL.

I'm rebuilding the section of my site that uses this table, so now I'm wondering, which is better:

1. Leaving the table as-is, with so many rows that have so many NULL columns; or

2. Splitting this in to 3 tables, moving the 6 columns to one table, and the 5 columns to another table.

And if it's better to have the 3 tables, should I:

A. Do a LEFT JOIN on the tables with every query, even though most of them won't join anything; or

B. Do an initial query where I learn whether "category" matches something that requires one of the other two tables, and if so do a second query?

My current code, in PHP:

$query = sprintf("SELECT
id, 
category, 
subcat, 
col4, 
col5, 
col6,
...
col22
FROM tableA
WHERE id = '%s'
LIMIT 1",
 mysqli_real_escape_string($dbh, $_GET['id']));

If I do a LEFT JOIN with every query:

$query = sprintf("SELECT
id, 
category, 
subcat, 
col4, 
col5, 
col6,
...
col22
FROM tableA
 LEFT JOIN tableB
 ON tableA.id = tableB.id
 LEFT JOIN tableC
 ON tableA.id = tableC.id
WHERE id = '%s' LIMIT 1",
 mysqli_real_escape_string($dbh, $_GET['id']));

Or multiple queries:

$query = sprintf("SELECT
id, 
category, 
subcat, 
col4, 
col5, 
col6,
...
col11
FROM tableA
WHERE id = '%s'
LIMIT 1",
 mysqli_real_escape_string($dbh, $_GET['id']));

$sth_data = mysqli_query($dbh, $query);

while (list($id, $category, $junk) = mysql_fetch_row($sth_data)) {
 $query2 = false;

 if ($category == 'example') {
 $query2 = "SELECT * FROM tableB WHERE id = $id";
 $sth_moredata = mysqli_query($dbh, $query2);
 list($col12, $col13,..., $col17) = mysql_fetch_row($sth_moredata)
 }

 elseif ($category = 'something_else') {
 $query2 = "SELECT * FROM tableC WHERE id = $id";
 $sth_moredata = mysqli_query($dbh, $query2);
 list($col18, $col19,..., $col22) = mysql_fetch_row($sth_moredata)
 }

 ...
}

Please excuse any typos, I just typed most of that up for this post.

Which do you guys think would be the better solution? Or, how would I determine which would be the better solution? The top priority is to make the query run (and the page load) as fast as possible.