Comment by cletus

Yeah I'm not sold. One example from this post that struck me was the author wanted to embed a select in a table expression. I'm not a fan of this at all. I don't want it not to be clear if a given expression list will explode in values or not.

I like the fact that SQL has a solid foundation in relational algebra. I see no such foundation for the alternative.

I do like what LINQ did here (being SQLish), which was to put the FROM clauses first. Some SQL variants have WITH clauses that are quite convenient but you end up with:

    WITH (...) AS a,
    (...) AS b
    SELECT
      a.a1,
      b.b1
    FROM a
    JOIN b
    ON a.a = b.b

Common alternative:

   SELECT
     a.a1,
     b.b1
   FROM (...) a
   JOIN (...) b
   ON a.a = b.b

whereas I'd prefer:

   FROM (...) a
   JOIN (...) b
   ON a.a = b.b
   SELECT
     a.a1,
     b.b1