...vendors will follow the standard. IIRC, the || operator is in the SQL'99 standard but not the SQL'92 standard. MS hasn't gotten around to being fully compliant with SQL'92, so there's not much hope that they will get SQL'99 compliant anytime soon.

Speaking of which, there are SQL standards for Stored Procedures, but no one seems to have come close to abiding by those.

And while I'm ranting, I think the SQL standards committee are assholes for requiring payment for the standards documentation. At least the W3C makes their recommendations publicly available at no charge.