What specifically do you find verbose? The only thing I find redundant (based on the queries I handle) is that theoretically join arguments could be deduced from foreign keys (maybe extending this behavior, having joins automatically deduced).

I also wonder if the perceived verbosity is caused by some programmers cramming logic into the queries, rather than keeping them simple and processing the results in the client language.

It's verbose compared to a lot of other languages simply by using words rather than symbols or abbreviations for most things. Though I tried to convey that I did not think this was a bad thing.

The only case where things get really verbose for me is when I need to do subqueries for columns. Often I might need to run basically the same subquery but return aggregates over different fields, ie sum of net weight, sum of gross weight, sum of value. For performance reasons I can't write that as a join, at least on our SQL server.

I agree there should be a shortcut syntax for joining using foreign keys ("join X on foreign key"?) though.

Agreed, I didn't want to convey that it's not verbose, either :-)