I understand the desire to reorder clauses in a way that makes sense to the user, but they seem to discount the value in the formality of enforcing a particular order to the clauses: you're assured that if the query contains, say an ORDER BY clause, it will always appear at the end, no need to hunt for it.
Also, why the need to match semantic evaluation order when there are far more important things happening under the hood that affect the execution plan (indexes, etc.)?
> Side-effects at a distance...The same columns are cross-referenced in SELECT, GROUP BY and ORDER BY, and corresponding edits are often required in three places
> when there are far more important things happening under the hood that affect the execution plan
It feels like google is only concerned with large query engines like BigQuery where you're relying on partitioning and sort order within partitions more than you can indexes or complicated multi table reference semantics.
> Can't this be avoided by using aliases?
In any language where variables are hard to declare and use pipes always feel like a good option; however, just adding some variables in is probably the better solution in most cases.
Also, why the need to match semantic evaluation order when there are far more important things happening under the hood that affect the execution plan (indexes, etc.)?
> Side-effects at a distance...The same columns are cross-referenced in SELECT, GROUP BY and ORDER BY, and corresponding edits are often required in three places
Can't this be avoided by using aliases?