Mr. fisher you are correct. You can't eliminate the WHERE all the time. If I gave that impression then I apologize for a misstatement.

I'm not against any clause in SQL, so avoiding any of them is not a thing for me. Des the query return the correct data and use resources as wisely as possible? Then it's good. If part of that turns out that there is no WHERE then fine.

I find that pre-filtering using things like CTEs to be helpful but there are still folks, including me, that have SQL 2000 instances.