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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

A few years back I toyed with the idea of building something like this. It was a dark time that I was stuck using a database besides Postgres.

If you want to really make this usable here's what you need to add:

- usql -f foo.sql

- Allow @path/to/file.sql and @@path/to/relative/file.sql references

- Common syntax for referencing env variables in SQL (each DB's utilities have slightly different syntaxes so have to pick one)

- External transaction demarcation to ensure a set of commands get executed together (ex: psql --single-transaction)

- Some autocompletion (if you plan on this being used for interactive use)

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Auto-completion will come in time. I don't know if I would allow "relative" pathing via @@, I'm not sure why you wouldn't just use general paths. As for the other options, such as -f, etc., yes those will be put in place. I am hoping to make this a 100% drop in replacement for psql, so whatever psql supports on the command line, as well as the various backslash commands (ie, \f) will be added.

Relative paths are a must. I don't think I ever use non-relative paths.

Say you have a folder structure like this:

    sql/
      tables/
        foo.sql
        bar.sql
      main.sql

And the contents of main.sql are something like this:

      @@tables/foo.sql
      @@tables/foo.sql

Then you can run main.sql via: usql -f sql/main.sql

If script file resolution is not relative pathed to the parent, it gets very fragile as you must invoke the parent from a specific location, or, you have to hard code full pathes in your scripts (arguably even uglier).

This is a feature in psql? I must admit if it is, I'm not familiar with it.

Yes psql supports it. The syntax is "\i path/to/file.sql" or "\ir relative/path/to/file.sql". The latter is resolved relative to the parent script. Makes nesting scripts possible without losing your sanity.

Yes, if it's in psql, I'll get it into usql in the near future.

(for certain large values of near).

This feature is actually borrowed from Oracle's SQLPlus.

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