Yes, but V for Vendor and VA for VendorAddress would make it more meaningful and understandable (if you know the schema), wouldn't it?

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I agree, but.....

I always found it easier to visualize the execution plan by referring to the driving table as "a". Plus, I wouldn't have to think about things like "well, I've got two tables that start with 'cl', so I'll call one 'cla' and other one 'cli' and...", well, pretty soon the syntax becomes cluttered again.

So for me it's always been abc. Simple.

What else I find interesting that, in the Oracle world, I got used to underscores and either all upper-case for keywords and all lower-case for indentifiers. I call it "Oracle style".

But now I work for a company that uses SQL Server and it's all mixed case.

So I no longer use "abc" and I code in SQL Server style. I tend to go with the flow.

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You got a point there Karl about the driving table being aliased as "A", never thought of that. However, I still prefer aliases to be consistent across multiple statements, i.e. in my next query the driving table (which you would call "A") is different to the one in the previous query.