I have no idea if this should be surprising or not. To tell you the truth, I have never assigned a table-alias to something and then tried to use the unaliased name (which would make one wonder why bother going to all the trouble of assigning an alias then -- it is just extra typing for naught). Then again, you can use the same table multiple times in a single query if both are in scope then you must use an alias to refer to one of them.