[balakk]

Sorry but I've to agree with the other flippant response to this post. The whole idea of SQL is to avoid such imperative thinking, and SQL optimizers are incredibly good in most prominent DB engines. There are ways to hint and influence a certain query plan; but that's not to take away from the incredible convenience that SQL affords for writing adhoc queries.

[fallingfrog]

The ones I’ve used (mainly Microsoft sql server) are not just bad, they’re abysmally bad for any query that’s not extremely trivial. Writing every query with explicit joins is a necessity almost 100% of the time. Maybe you’ve just never tried to do anything tricky with large tables with a lot of data? Query optimizers almost always resort to nested table scans as soon as you do anything even slightly complex.