Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com> writes:
> I just don't see the ability to omit the alias in a query with only one
> subquery (the only circumstances under which it would be safe to do so) as
> any significant gain in fuctionality.
Why do you think it'd be restricted to only one subquery?
As long as you take care that the subquery's column names don't match
any other ones in the query, you don't *need* an alias for it ---
there'll be no need to qualify the column names. This extends just
fine to multiple subqueries.
(But I'm still bugged by the idea that there's some deep reason for the
SQL committee to have disallowed this syntax. There's certainly not any
obvious reason why they did so. Conceivably it was just politics ---
some Big Vendor using a parser that couldn't deal with it --- but maybe
there is something else, like a planned future extension that'd break
this syntax.)
regards, tom lane