Agreed, I've always thought this, CTE's kind of do this, but unfortunately Postgres does not optimise them (one of it's few failings). The SQL standard should b

Agreed, I've always thought this, CTE's kind of do this, but unfortunately Postgres does not optimise them (one of it's few failings). The SQL standard should be changed to optionally allow FROM to come first. SQl is amazingly powerful, sometimes over verbose though e.g windows functions. Also Natural join should be improved, with an option to use Foreign Keys to determine columns to join on, instead of just common column names which can be risky.