That's the first question I have after reading the title. Haven't read the article.
Edited the first sentence. Originally it was "Why it is not called SQL if works on tabular data?".
My point, if one wants cat, sort, sed, join on tabular data, SOL is exactly that. Awk is too powerful, not sure about it.
It has far better handling of a CSV/TSV file on the command line directly and is compasable in shell pipelines.
>My point, if one wants cat, sort, sed, join on tabular data, SOL is exactly that.
SQL is a language for data in the form of tables in relational databases.
While it can do sorting or joining or some changes, it is meant for a different domain than these tools, which other constraints, other concerns, and other patterns of use...
You don't need to load anything to a db, for starters.
You also normally don't care for involving a DB in order to use in a shell script, or for quick shell exploration.
You also can't mix SQL and regular unix userland in a pipeline (well, with enough effort you can, but it's not something people do or need to do).
Doesn't need to load anything to DB
Can be used in shell
Can read from stdin and write to stdout
https://towardsdatascience.com/analyze-csvs-with-sql-in-comm...
The problem isn't in having a way to use SQL to query the data from the command line, it's that SQL is long winded and with syntax not really fit in a traditional shell pipeline.
2. Because it's closer to an amalgamation of the standard shell scripting tools (cut, sort, jq, etc) than it is to a SQL variant.
so, it remains simple and concise for the easy problems, yet can scale up to address the trickier ones as well.
i've used csvkit, sqlite, jq, etc. miller is my favorite tool for data-fu (with sqlite being a close 2nd)