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Comment by tmoertel | Hacker News Reader

The point of SQL pipe syntax is that there is no reordering. You read the query as a sequence of operations, and that's exactly how it's executed. (Semantically. Of course, the query engine is free to optimize the execution plan as long as the semantics are preserved.)

The pipe operator is a semantic execution barrier:everything before the `|>` is assumed to have executed and returned a table before what follows begins:

From the paper:

> Each pipe operator is a unary relational operation that takes one table as input and produces one table as output.

Vanilla SQL is actually more complex in this respect because you have, for example, at least 3 different keywords for filtering (WHERE, HAVING, QUALIFY) and everyone who reads your query needs to understand what each keyword implies regarding execution scheduling. (WHERE is before grouping, HAVING is after aggregates, and QUALIFY is after analytic window functions.)

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Golly, QUALIFY, a new SQL operator I didn’t know existed. I tend not to do much with window functions and I would have reached for a CTE instead but it’s always nice to be humbled by finding something new in a language you thought you knew well.

Is not common at all, is a non ANSI SQL clause that afaik was created by Teradata, syntactic sugar for filtering using window functions directly without CTEs or temp tables, especially useful for dedup. In most cases at least, for example you can't do a QUALIFY in an query that is aggregating data just as you can't use a window function when aggregating.

Other engines that implement it are direct competitors in that space: Snowflake, Databricks SQL, BigQuery, Clickhouse, and duckdb (only OSS implementation I now). Point is: if you want to compete with Teradata and be a possible migration target, you want to implement QUALIFY.

Anecdote: I went from a company that had Teradata to another where I had to implement all the data stack in GCP. I shed tears of joy when I knew BQ also had QUALIFY. And the intent was clear, as they also offered various Teradata migration services.

> The point of SQL pipe syntax is that there is no reordering.

But this thing resembles other FROM-clause-first variants of SQL, thus GP's point about this being just a reordering. GP is right: the FROM clause gets re-ordered to be first, so it's a reordering.

> The pipe operator is a semantic execution barrier:everything before the `|>` is assumed to have executed and returned a table before what follows begins

I already think about SQL like this (as operation on lists/sets), however thinking of it like that, and having previous operations feed into the next, which is conceptually nice, seems to make it hard to do, and think about:

> *(the query engine is free to optimize the execution plan as long as the semantics are preserved)

since logically each part between the pipes doesn't know about the others, so global optimizations, such as use of indexes to restrict the result of a join based on the where clause can't be done/is more difficult.

This kind of implies there's better or worse ordering. AFAIK that's pretty subjective. If the idea was to expose how the DB is ordering things, or even make things easier for autocomplete OK, but this just feels like a "I have a personal aesthetic problem with SQL and I think we should spend thousands of engineering hours and bifurcate SQL projects forever to fix it" kind of thing.

> Vanilla SQL [...] QUALIFY is after analytic window functions

Isn't that FILTER (WHERE), as in SELECT avg(...) FILTER (WHERE ...) FROM ...?

This is an interesting point.

All these years I've been doing that reordering and didn't even realize!

> The point of SQL pipe syntax is that there is no reordering.

If you're referring to this in the comment you're replying to:

> Can we call this SQL anymore after this? This re-ordering of things ...

Then they're clearly just saying that this is a reordering compared to SQL, which is undeniably true (and the while point).

The post I was referring to said that this new pipe syntax was a big reordering compared to the vanilla syntax, which it is. But my point is that if you're going to understand the vanilla syntax, you already have to do this reordering in your head because the order in which the the vanilla syntax executes (inside out) is the order in which pipes syntax reads. So it's just easier all around to adopt the pipe syntax so that reading and execution are the same.

'qualify' is now standard? Thought it was a vendor extension currently.

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