Is NATURAL (JOIN) considered harmful in production environment?

Question

I am reading about NATURAL shorthand form for SQL joins and I see some traps:

• it just takes automatically all same named column-pairs (use USI

Answer 1

Do you mean the syntax like this:

SELECT * 
  FROM t1, t2, t3 ON t1.id = t2.id 
                 AND t2.id = t3.id

Versus this:

         SELECT *  
           FROM t1 
LEFT OUTER JOIN t2 ON t1.id = t2.id 
                  AND t2.id = t3.id

I prefer the 2nd syntax and also format it differently:

         SELECT *
           FROM T1
LEFT OUTER JOIN T2 ON T2.id = T1.id
LEFT OUTER JOIN T3 ON T3.id = T2.id

In this case, it is very clear what tables I am joining and what ON clause I am using to join them. By using that first syntax is just too easy to not put in the proper JOIN and get a huge result set. I do this because I am prone to typos, and this is my insurance against that. Plus, it is visually easier to debug.