right? like it's a graph and a relational model query and a pipeline and a language and an abstract syntax tree and declarative logical plan

what do you think is the "most bad" thing about SQL?

TIL about Verse looks cool I'll have to check it out.

> SQL is not a pipeline, it is a graph.

Maybe it's both? and maybe there will always be hard-to-express queries in SQL, and that's ok?

the RDBMS's relational model is certainly a graph and joins accordingly introduce complexity.

For me, just as creators of the internet regret that subdomains come before domains, I really we could go back in time and have `FROM` be the first predicate and not `SELECT`. This is much more intuitive and lends itself to the idea of a pipeline: a table scan (FROM) that is piped to a projection (SELECT).

I'm as big a SQL stan as the next person and I'm also very skeptical anytime anyone says that SQL needs to be replaced.

At the same time, it's challenging that SQL cannot be iteratively improved and experimented upon.

IMHO, PRQL is a reasonable approach to extending SQL without replacing SQL.

But what I'd love to see is projects like Google's zeta-sql [1] and Substrait [2] get more traction. It would provide a more stable, standardized foundation upon which SQL could be improved, which would make the case for "SQL forever" even more strong.

I've blogged about this before [3].

[1]: https://github.com/google/googlesql [2]: https://substrait.io/ [3]: https://roundup.getdbt.com/p/problem-exists-between-database...

I agree that CTEs help solve the problem of being able to read a SQL query from top to bottom, but I wouldn't say they're a panacea!

Personally, it's weird to me that `FROM` (scan) comes after `SELECT` (projection). IMHO the datasource should come first!

CTEs don't solve this problem they just let you chain multiple SELECTs together.

A real use case is that it would allow intellisense to kick in a lot earlier!

Instead you have to write `SELECT * FROM my_table` and only after can you edit the `*` and get auto-complete suggestions of the columns from `my_table`