On 2024-05-18 17:12 +0200, David G. Johnston wrote: > Too lazy to find the docs right now but what you are observing is basically > an operator precedence effect. The comma join hasn’t happened at the time > the left join is evaluated and so other tables in the comma join cannot > appear in the on clause of the left join. Placing everything inside a > single from slot and moving the conditions to the where clause removes > changes the precedence aspect so that the cross join does indeed evaluate > prior to the left join. Thanks David. The docs on table expressions clarify the precedence: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/16/queries-table-expressions.html#QUERIES-FROM I'm using SQL for 17 years now and yet I still forget that joins are table expressions m( -- Erik