On Mon, Dec 27, 2021, at 19:15, Tom Lane wrote: > NATURAL JOIN is widely regarded as a foot-gun that the SQL committee > should never have invented. Why would we want to create another one? > > (I suspect that making the constraint name optional would be problematic > for reasons of syntax ambiguity, anyway.)
I agree. I remember this blog post from 2013 discussing the problems with both NATURAL but also the problems with USING: http://www.databasesoup.com/2013/08/fancy-sql-monday-on-vs-natural-join-vs.html Since my last email in this thread, I've learned KEY is unfortunately not a reserved keyword. This probably means the proposed "JOIN KEY" would be problematic, since a relation could be named KEY. Can with think of some other suitable reserved keyword? How about JOIN WITH? join_type JOIN WITH fk_table.fk_name [ [ AS ] alias ] join_type JOIN fk_table [ [ AS ] alias ] WITH fk_name REF pk_table FROM permission p LEFT JOIN WITH p.permission_role_id_fkey r LEFT JOIN team_role tr WITH team_role_role_id_fkey REF r LEFT JOIN WITH tr.team_role_team_id_fkey t LEFT JOIN user_role ur WITH user_role_role_id_fkey REF r LEFT JOIN WITH ur.user_role_user_id_fkey u WHERE p.id = 1; /Joel
