Hi Vlad,
You make an interesting observation about the # of queries apparently required with my SQL statement. I am not sure that the issue you mentioned applies to SQL however, as SQL is a non-procedural language. As I understand it, that means that the details of the implementation are determined at run time, and hidden from the developer. In general I would think that as long as the chosen SQL statement is one that was expected by the writers of the SQL implementation that the optimization process would find a sufficiently efficient way of processing the query, which would probably not match our logical model of how the query would be processed.

P.S. Wasn't the initial question how to perform the query in one SQL statement?