At every company I have worked at, I have found that people are still writing their SQL queries in the ANSI-89 standard:
select a.id, b.id, b.address_1
from
1) Standard way to write OUTER JOIN, versus *= or (+)=
2) NATURAL JOIN
3) Depend in the database engine, ANSI-92 trends to be more optimal.
4) Manual optimization :
Let's say that we have the next syntax (ANSI-89):
(1)select * from TABLE_OFFICES to,BIG_TABLE_USERS btu
where to.iduser=tbu.iduser and to.idoffice=1
It could be written as:
(2)select * from TABLE_OFFICES to
inner join BIG_TABLE_USERS btu on to.iduser=tbu.iduser
where to.idoffice=1
But also as :
(3)select * from TABLE_OFFICES to
inner join BIG_TABLE_USERS btu on to.iduser=tbu.iduser and to.idoffice=1
All of them (1),(2),(3) return the same result, however they are optimized differently, it depends in the database engine but most of them do :
5) Longer queries are less messy.