>>IMO, SQL fields should be aliased one way or another because there's no sane way to format or tidy them, and this only if it's a join.
>
>Could you elaborate? I don't need to alias fields in a join...

You don't - your fields are prefixed. That's one for you. In regular (ummm) case, when same field in two tables has the same name, if you say

Select i.*, c.* from invoice i, customer c where c.custcode=i.custcode

the resulting cursor will have fields like custcode_a and custcode_b, because it will include equal field names twice and name them like this to aviod ambiguity. It usually narrows down to picking fewer fields, like

Select i.*, c.custTitle, c.custAddress, c.custPhone;
from invoice i, customer c where c.custcode=i.custcode

So you do have a point here - this is the case where prefixing has some real advantages for us lazy programmers :).

>One other (slight) advantage to using prefixes (that occurred to me as I read another thread) is that there's no danger of using a reserved word as a field name.

I think I wrote that :)