Comment by jacques_chester | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacques_chester | Hacker News Reader

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jacques_chester

> This is valid SQL.

> SELECT 1;

Something like Oracle's "dual" table would handle this corner case. Or just selecting a value from itself:

    FROM 1 SELECT 1;

or

    FROM ::integer SELECT 1;

Or whathaveyou. In any case, the SELECT 1 case isn't fatal to putting FROM first, merely annoying.

> Intelligent tooling can and does already solve this.

It can progressively guess as you type, but it can't provide an upfront list of alternatives for autocompletion. That is an annoyance.

Given how often `SELECT ` is already the developer "default" especially in debugging and REPL work there's a good case that `SELECT ` can truly just be the implied default case and something like `FROM 1` makes perfect sense as a standalone statement.

Even neater.

DuckDB has an implicit "SELECT *" if you just give it "FROM tablename", which fits your example.

But interestingly DuckDB doesn't support `SELECT 'FOO' AS BAR FROM DUAL;` or `SELECT 'FOO' AS BAR FROM 1;`.

Which I guess makes sense if it has an implicit `SELECT *`.

What would the implicit projection of `FROM DUAL;` be?

From my experience of Oracle `FROM DUAL;` projection would give you on a coin flip either an empty table or a stacktrace error from some Java library.

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