To solve this question, the user needs to have a basic understanding of SQL joins and how to prevent cartesian products.
When joining N tables, the minimum number of conditions that should appear in the WHERE clause to produce a meaningful result set without any cartesian products is N - 1. This is because each join condition connects two tables, and N tables can be connected by N - 1 join conditions.
Option A (4) and Option B (3) are not correct because they provide specific numbers of conditions that do not apply to all cases. The number of conditions needed depends on the number of tables being joined, which is not specified in the question.
Option C (N - 1) is correct, as explained above.
Option D (N + 1) is incorrect because adding an additional condition would result in a more restrictive query, potentially excluding valid results.
Therefore, the answer is: C. N - 1.