Unambiguous things can become ambiguous at later points. As soon as you add a second relation between the tables, what once was unambiguous now is, and because

Unambiguous things can become ambiguous at later points. As soon as you add a second relation between the tables, what once was unambiguous now is, and because of something which may be entirely unrelated to the specifics of the original query. This is where many conveniences that use implicit data run into problems. A small convenience now for the possibility of accidentally breaking because of mostly unrelated changes later is a poor trade off for anyone that wants to have stable and consistent software. This is likely one of those cases where you're better off with tooling to help make writing the correct unambiguous code easier (or automated away) than introducing a feature which leads to less stable systems in some cases. Edit: Along the lines of what you note at the end, I would rather see joins able to use named relations as defined in the schema. Of there's a relation from table movie to table actor specifically names roles in the schema, I would rather be able to join movie on roles and have actors joined correctly using that relation, and aliases to roles which I could then use. Then you're using features that are designed and stable and not implicit and subject to changing how or whether they function based on semi-unrelated changes. That might look like: "from movie relate roles" which is equivalent to "from movie join actor roles on movie.id = roles.movie_id", but because actor.movie_id has a constraint in the schema named roles which restricts it to a movie.id already.