Right, but my reading of jhourcle's post is that if you have columns named "id" in both tables, Oracle will automatically say "Oh, look - two columns with the same name! I'll be helpful and automatically JOIN them!" If this is the case (I'm not that familiar with Oracle, so I may be misunderstanding what he meant), then it doesn't matter how you refer to them in your query, the DB's misguided attempt to be "helpful" will still cause problems.