It seems to me, from both personal experience and SO questions and answers, that SQL implementations vary substantially. One of the first issues for SQL questions is: What dbms are you using?
In most cases with SQL there are several ways to structure a given query, even using the same dialect. But I find it interesting that the relative portability of various approaches is frequently not discussed, nor valued very highly when it is.
But even disregarding the likelihood that any given application may or not be subject to conversion, I'd think that we would prefer that our skills, habits, and patterns be as portable as possible.
In your work with SQL, how strongly do you prefer standard SQL syntax? How actively do you eschew propriety variations? Please answer without reference to proprietary preferences for the purpose of perceived better performance, which most would concede is usually a sufficiently legitimate defense.
We take it very seriously at our shop. We do not allow non-standard SQL or extensions unless they're supported on ALL of the major platforms. Even then, they're flagged within the code as non-standard and justifications are necessary.
It is not up to the application developer to make their queries run fast, we have a clear separation of duties. The query is to be optimized only by the DBMS itself or the DBAs tuning of the DBMS.
Real databases, like DB2/z :-), process standard SQL plenty fast.
The reason we enforce this is to give the customer choice. They don't like the idea of being locked into a specific vendor any more than we do.