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It is a really useful feature for ad hoc examination of datasets. Not every data-analysis is going into a massive, mission critical production build chain. Quite often you just want to look at the data in a REPL and IMO that sort of usage could bear to get a little easier

Inference for column names and datatypes seems only relevant for csv? Other formats convey that metadata, as e.g. parquet...

csv metadata inference in duckdb is amazing. There is some research in this domain and duckdb does a great job there, but yes there might be some really strange csv files, which require manual intervention.

It would be perfectly reasonable IMO to put your metadata elsewhere and still use DuckDB for processing.

What's wrong with the URL in the query?