Rashi's understanding is only one, as Michoel said, of the "70 faces of Torah". The syntax of this pasuq is inherently ambiguous, and it is not clear whether the correct reading of the verse is as a rhetorical question or a statement. Ibn Ezra explains that the Torah is in fact equating people and trees:


  ולפי דעתי: שאין לנו צורך לכל זה וזה פירושו כי ממנו תאכל ואותו לא תכרות, כי האדם עץ השדה. 
  והטעם: כי חיי בן אדם הוא עץ השדה
  
  In my opinion, we don't need these or those [erroneous explanations of other commentators]. Rather, the [correct] explanation is, "For you should eat from it, and not destroy it, because [as] a person is the tree of the field." Meaning, the lives of people are [as] trees of the field.


Regardless of which explanation holds more ground grammatically, the point remains: throughout TaNaKh, trees are powerful metaphors for righteous people, happiness, stability, and the Torah itself. As Shalom wrote, poetic/midrashic license allows us to read this (admittedly ambiguously phrased) pasuq in a way to derive meaning. See, for examples, some of the sources that Jeff Spitzer brings in his article here, including the Tzena uRena and the MaHaRaL of Prague.

Is the tree of the field a man?
I am trying to find the fastest way to find all of the records in a parent table that do not have certain records in a child table. For example, I want the query to return all of the family records where there are no male children or no children at all. 

Example 1

This is painfully slow:

SELECT * FROM Families
WHERE Families.FamilyID NOT IN(SELECT FamilyID FROM Children WHERE Children.Gender="m")

Example 2

This is faster:

SELECT * FROM Families
WHERE NOT EXISTS(SELECT * FROM Children WHERE Children.Gender="m" AND Children.FamilyID = Families.FamilyID)

Example 3

This is the fastest, but I'm worried about investing in it because I can't find any documentation on it. I don't even know what it's called. For want of a better term, we have been calling it an "anonymous query". 

SELECT * FROM Families
LEFT JOIN
[SELECT * FROM Children WHERE Gender="m"]. AS AliasChildren
ON Families.FamilyID=AliasChildren.FamilyID
WHERE AliasChildren.FamilyID IS NULL

So my question is this:


What is this thing called in example 3?
Is it a "mainstream" feature of Access that
will be supported in the future?
Where can I find documentation on
it (this might be easier once I know what it's called)?


Thanks!
