From the Mind of Trevor Stone

The following is legal syntax in SQL Server 2005:
select * from my_table t where t.foo = 1

The following is not legal syntax in SQL Server 2005:
delete from my_table t where t.foo = 1

In this example, the table alias doesn't add anything, but it does in the following:
delete from my_table t1 where foo = 1 and not exists (select null from my_table t2 where t2.foo = 2 and t1.id = t2.id)

Table aliases are necessary to do same-table subselects and joins, and SQL Server will happily let you use them to find out what data you plan to delete, but not to actually delete that same data. I instead switched to
delete from my_table t1 where foo = 1 and id not in (select id from my_table t2 where t2.foo = 2)
which takes a really long time because it does the subselect for every row matching foo = 1.

If Microsoft's implementation of SQL were compared to Microsoft's implementations of JavaScript/DOM/CSS, I suspect the latter would have way more annoying quirks, but the former has way more annoying basic problems. The fact that my CD started skipping while sorting this out (and probably need to be returned to the store) adds to the general grumpiness of the moment.