[vog]

Indeed, this is also what always annoyed me.

I suspect that this has to do with the fact that NATURAL JOIN is intended to work for sub-SELECTs and VIEWs, too. On those, it is quite hard and error-prone to determine "foreign key" equivalents.

Also note that restricting NATURAL JOINs to tables wouldn't be a good solution here, either, because that would prevent you from ever JOINing more than 2 tables: When JOINing 3 tables, you effectively do have some kind of sub SELECT after having joined the first two tables, which is then supposed to be joined with the third one.

[marcosdumay]

You get the same sort of problems jessedhillon was talking about.

That is, you lose absolutely nothing - just changes its semantics.