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Over the years, we’ve found that even power users who know they’ll eventually go into SQL mode prefer to start in the visual mode, as the grouping, date formatt
by mhink 7y ago
Over the years, we’ve found that even power users who know they’ll eventually go into SQL mode prefer to start in the visual mode, as the grouping, date formatting, and joins are all done automatically.
This is huge, right here. I can use and understand SQL well enough, but the syntax annoys me constantly. Avoiding that would be a huge boon.
- thingsilearned 7y agoYeah - changing date formats, double typing things you're grouping and ordering by, remembering the oddities of each dialect, typing out full join paths - it's a nice experience to have that done automatically. Right now the SQL we write is very proper - with quotes around all of the column names and table names listed before each column name. It's not what a human would write. I'd love to one day make it a little more human so that the switching into SQL mode will feel even better. It'll be a fun project.
- infinite8s 7y agoWhat do you think of Looker's idea of turning SQL into a higher level analytic DSL (which can be written/implemented by data engineers)? This DSL then makes it easy for end users to do a more complicated analytics. One issue I've had with pure SQL for analytic purposes is that a user can't build a library of higher-order functions that can be parameterized (imagine a window function to do a cumulative returns across various time periods, applied to different underlying source columns), so its difficult to build up a common business domain language without taking the typical approach of constructing SQL through glueing string fragments together typical of most programming language SQL libraries.