[jmileham]

This is a great way to spin not having a query planner as a feature, but I'm glad to have one every day that I write and compose semantic bits of SQL that can and should have different execution plans depending on the context in which they're evaluated.

[bmm6o]

The whole article is like one long spin job. "Explicit" is somehow the happy medium between the query engine putting together a plan based on data statistics and... I'm not even sure what space this claims to be the middle of. Keeping the examples simple enough so that there is an unambiguously right order of operations - filter before you sort, that's genius! There's no way your granddad's RDBMS could have figured that one out! What if the optimal order depends on the values, or changes over time? Just rewrite and recompile?