Show HN: PRQL 0.2 – a better SQL

Hi everyone — thanks for your interest in PRQL — let us know any questions or feedback!

We're excited to be releasing 0.2[1], the first version of PRQL you can use in your own projects. It wouldn't exist without the feedback we got from HackerNews when we originally posted the proposal.

[1]: https://github.com/prql/prql/releases/tag/0.2.0

Show HN: PRQL 0.2 – a better SQL
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Is it true that this is somehow an analogue to how JS development is really ultimately targeting browser-compatible-JS in the end, even though we use the latest ECMAScript features & TypeScript in development? I.e. is it expected someone writes PRQL and then transpiles before executing against the database? Is there a REPL one can use against a local Postgres or something?

> Is there a REPL one can use against a local Postgres or something?

Somewhat — you can use it in Jupyter now[1]; e.g.:

    %%prql
    from p = products.csv
    group categoryID (
      aggregate [average unitPrice]
    )

This doesn't yet have the benefits we'd get from e.g. autocomplete, so there's much more to do there.

There's also a cool TUI in PyPrql[2]

[1]: https://pyprql.readthedocs.io/en/latest/magic_readme.html

[2]: https://pyprql.readthedocs.io/en/latest/readme.html

From a mathematical point-of-view are there any transforms/operations (note: not end results, but actual operations) that this can do that SQL can't or vice-versa?

This looks great. I've thought about something similar to this for quite a while now. Column autocomplete is key for me from a quality of life perspective and to make it truly usable.

I'd absolutely love to see the next level of this pipeline be continued where something like Observable Plot or ggplot2 like functionality where you can take your pipeline data analysis and directly plot it to visualize it.