Re: Automatic SQL query builder

Jeff Zucker wrote:
>
> I wasn't asking anything. I was giving an example of why one might want
> to retain the actual syntax used in a query rather than just its
> meaning. You had said in your answer to the OP that "explicit joins are
> not necessary in SQL" which might be true on some level, but there are
> other levels in which maintaining the distinction is important (e.g.
> some implementations optimize differentially depending on the syntax of
> the explicit join, or e.g. the kinds of transformations I mention
> above). So even if things like BETWEEN, IN, explicit joins, etc. are
> really just uneccessary syntactic sugar, there may be reasons to
> preserve them in a SQL query builder.

Oh yes, that is all definitely true, and I didn't mean to say that you can always ignore those differences. The point was that the original question was about translating a query in some Query-by-example-like format to an SQL query. In that case you -- strictly speaking -- don't need the explicit join, although you might use it for optimization reasons if you have a database with no or only a rudimentary query optimizer.

-- 
  Jan Hidders