[38911BBF]

IMHO lots of teachers have an absolute horrible understanding of relational databases and SQL. Myself included, until I started working at large financial institutions and read every book by Joe Celko I could lay my hands on.

E.g. using NATURAL JOINs covers about 1/3 of the use cases where students or apprentices are usually fiddling with INNER JOINs or joining relations using WHERE TableA.ID = TableB.ID, and it's syntax is much simpler.

With a well thought out schema, I personally find that NATURAL JOINs covers about 80% of my needs in that respect, and being unable to NATURAL JOIN tables is beginning to indicate well, not a "code smell" but what I would call a "schema smell".

I fully agree. Joining relations in a relational databases should absolutely be simple - and it absolutely can be:

          SELECT col_x, col_y
            FROM TableA
    NATURAL JOIN TableB

[duiker101]

Thanks for your comment, I actually never heard of NATURAL JOIN, I will have to play with it but it seems very interesting!