If you exploring a set of tables you have never touched before, it really neat if you could just type in:
FROM tablename t
SELECT t.<press tab>
and some form of autocomplete mechanism, either prefills all the column names from table "t" or suggests the list of columns and/or types associated with it.
This is much better than having to:
1. Run a SELECT with LIMIT statement just to get an idea of the layout.
2. Point and click through the IDE treeview.
Honestly, I don't think it helps a whole lot beyond this functionality, but I can see why folks who are accustomed to thinking in functional pipelines (from -> select -> map -> filter -> collect) can prefer this way of querying.
I think PRQL is one attempt at building something this way.[1]
FROM tablename t SELECT t.<press tab>
and some form of autocomplete mechanism, either prefills all the column names from table "t" or suggests the list of columns and/or types associated with it.
This is much better than having to: 1. Run a SELECT with LIMIT statement just to get an idea of the layout. 2. Point and click through the IDE treeview.
Honestly, I don't think it helps a whole lot beyond this functionality, but I can see why folks who are accustomed to thinking in functional pipelines (from -> select -> map -> filter -> collect) can prefer this way of querying.
I think PRQL is one attempt at building something this way.[1]
[1]. https://github.com/prql/prql