Actually the trial balance example came about because of addressing dependencies in join conditions that would have made it very difficult to address the same t

Actually the trial balance example came about because of addressing dependencies in join conditions that would have made it very difficult to address the same thing without it. I haven't tested it for large query sets but the idea is that usually you won't need to have a CTE covering more than about 14 months of data (assuming books are closed 2 months after fiscal end of year), or will only cover a small part of the data over a longer period. Of course for some businesses 14 months of data is still a lot of data for a CTE, maybe a couple hundred thousand rows, but given enough memory, PostgreSQL can be tuned for this.