I was curious so I tried this syntax on Postgres and it did not work as well. Personally, I like to see the table name as being updated. Updating an alias just seems wrong to me.

>>I take all that back. This does not work.
>>update ss set ss.siteCat = 1
>>from site as ss join trans t
>>on t.siteno = ss.siteno
>>where ss.recno = 9000016
>
>So, it seems SQL Server goes a little bit far more into support extra syntax, such as the one in my example. I got used to that. But, when trying the same SQL on that backend, it didn't. So, I guess that part was not fully SQL ANSI compliant. Is that also your findings?