This is a common complaint, but I've never felt the normal arrangement to be counter-intuitive. I read it as “I want the id and first name, you can get this fr

This is a common complaint, but I've never felt the normal arrangement to be counter-intuitive. I read it as “I want the id and first name, you can get this from…” — the projection clause stating what you want, and the following clauses detailing how the information what you want can be found in is arranged. You can also think of it like a recipe: “I'm, going to make a cake, from eggs, flour, …” rather than following the instructions then at the end being told what you are making. While “from <here>, filtering by <condition>, pick <things>” better matches your view of what the database engine is going to do to service your request, matching what the engine does internally to service your request is not SQL's priority. As another example of this: with joins you are not telling the engine “this is how to do…” (well, you are, but indirectly) — what you are actually doing is describing how the information links together. With this information and other information it already has (from the schema, particularly what indexes are available) it will decide the best way to proceed, and in fact will sometimes effectively reorder your request for efficiency (some simple DB engines will always follow the order you state the objects to use, but that is their limitation not something dictated by SQL in theory).