>>But again...I *really* encourage you to use some type of proper alias. In all candor, it royally pisses me off when people don't do it.
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>Now that you mention it, what is the reason why an Alias should be used? For me this seems counter productive, unless you have a self join, but I see many people doing it. It was my impression to give a short name when the table names would be too long, but it does not necessarily make the select more readable.

In my opinion, aliases make selects much more readable. Also, I have a rule to only use full name in the from clause and use aliases in all other places or the selects (and other DML statements). I do sometimes see code where the full name getting repeated in other places such as column list or where clause and to me it's just unnecessary clutter that makes select much harder to read. I usually try to correct such code when I see it.