Isn't that what llvm does? Or GCC? Or a JIT?
> Possibly it would be better to send small programs written in a "better" language (something like Lua) to the server?
I'd certainly like something better than SQL, but going for an imperative, Turing complete language seems like the opposite direction of where things should be going in this scenario.
My theory is people would understand indexes and the like way more if they were writing up the lookups
Eeehhh, kinda. Sure, a compiler will let you just write some assembly by hand, but it won't let you write a optimization step, or even directly configure it. You have to tweak your code or the compiler flag to give the right hints so the compiler generates the binary code you want. Doesn't look much different than a query planner.
To make a loose metaphor, if SQL is like high level opengl, then I want the low level Vulkan and shader APIs for hand optimization.
I would like this especially for Apache Spark sql, since a bad plan that isn't aware of the data shape can blow gigabytes over the network unnecessarily.