Why isn't SQL ANSI-92 standard better adopted over ANSI-89?

Question

At every company I have worked at, I have found that people are still writing their SQL queries in the ANSI-89 standard:

select a.id, b.id, b.address_1
from          


        

Answer 1

Oracle does not implement ANSI-92 at all well. I've had several problems, not least because the data tables in Oracle Apps are so very well endowed with columns. If the number of columns in your joins exceeds about 1050 columns (which is very easy to do in Apps), then you will get this spurious error which makes absolutely no logical sense:

ORA-01445: cannot select ROWID from a join view without a key-preserved table.

Re-writing the query to use old style join syntax makes the issue disappear, which seems to point the finger of blame squarely at the implementation of ANSI-92 joins.

Until I encountered this problem, I was a steadfast promoter of ASNI-92, because of the benefits in reducing the chance of an accidental cross join, which is far too easy to do with old-style syntax.

Now, however, I find it much more difficult to insist on it. They point to Oracle's bad implementation and say "We'll do it our way, thanks."