ORMs like Hibernate / jOOQ work around this by providing a convenient "dot notation" to navigate a foreign key path. This is particularly useful when keys are c

ORMs like Hibernate / jOOQ work around this by providing a convenient "dot notation" to navigate a foreign key path. This is particularly useful when keys are composite. See for example: https://blog.jooq.org/2018/02/20/type-safe-implicit-join-through-path-navigation-in-jooq-3-11 https://blog.jooq.org/2018/02/20/type-safe-implicit-join-thr... Indeed, this should be available in the SQL language as well. I can't think of a performance problem, having implemented this in jOOQ. There's always a very obvious mapping between the notation and inner/left joins, which are reusable for common paths and subpaths. At least for navigating to-one relationships. To-many relationships raise more questions. Some RDBMS support a T1 JOIN T2 ON KEY syntax, which is nice as well, but the path notation is much more powerful: SELECT c.first_name, c.last_name c.address.street, c.address.zip, c.address.city FROM customer c Instead of SELECT c.first_name, c.last_name a.street, a.zip, a.city FROM customer c JOIN address a USING (address_id)