Agreed! But rather than making the query compiler infer join paths from the schema, wouldn't it make more sense to support defining common join paths (like your

Agreed! But rather than making the query compiler infer join paths from the schema, wouldn't it make more sense to support defining common join paths (like your 'movie relate roles') in the language, and build a tool, that generates such definitions from the schema, as a separate step? I don't have a specific syntax in mind yet; for illustrative purposes: defjoin r,m,a = %prejoin_roles() -> { # define a common join path between three relations r,m,a: from r=ROLES # can hard-code table names or use parameters (which may refer to other parameters) join m=MOVIES [r.movie_id = m.movie_id] join a=ACTORS [r.actor_id = a.actor_id] } from r,m,a = %prejoin_roles() select m.title, a.character_name This `defjoin` thing is a limited version of PRQL `table`, which -- unlike a CTE -- remembers which relation each attribute comes from. Perhaps one can instead figure out how to extend `table` to support this.