Ability to shoot yourself in the foot IS a feature (or inevitability, depends on how you look at it). Requirement to shoot between feet is not, though. The pro

Ability to shoot yourself in the foot IS a feature (or inevitability, depends on how you look at it). Requirement to shoot between feet is not, though. The problem here is that SQL is declarative and there is nowhere to dig deeper - data set is described. That's what SQL does - describes data sets. And any attempt to dig deeper will lead to imperative code. With SQL I would actually hope that I cannot (statically) look up execution order without taking indexes, partitions and what-not into account.