Obviously one advantage of SQL is everyone knows it. But conceptually, I agree. I think [1]Malloy is also doing some really fantastic work in this area.
This is one of the reasons I'm excited about DuckDB's upcoming [2]PEG parser. If they can pull it off, we could have alternative dialects that run on DuckDB.
It's probably different for duckdb, but from something like Microsoft SQL tossing off these random queries at a database of any size could have some weird performance impacts. For example statistics on columns you don't want them on, unindexed queries with slow performance, temp tables being dumped out to disk, etc.
I agree; one thing that is neat about Instant SQL is for many reasons, you can't do this with in any other DBMS. You really need DuckDB's specific architecture and ergonomics.
Me too (author of the post here). In fact, I was watching a seasoned data engineer at MotherDuck show me how they would attempt to debug a regex in a CTE. As a longtime SQL user, I felt the pain immediately; haven't we all been there before? Instant SQL followed from that.
Correct. We only enable fast previews for SELECT statements, which is the actual hard problem. This said, at some point we're likely to also add support for previewing a CTAS before you actually run it.
