MS has done a fine job of getting in the way of writing concise SQL statements. ADO.NET Entity Framework is a very dangerous technology in the hands of developers who don't have any interest in the sql that is dynamically generated. The move to cloud based services should rectify most of this nonsense. It going to be hard to justify paying a significant hosting bill as a result of the poorly written code that some of these gui tools produce. No one at MS really mentions it but these poorly designed statements have no chance at scaling.