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Show HN: PRQL in PostgreSQL

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Re: Show HN: PRQL in PostgreSQL

#41

Post by PartiallyTyped »

throwaway143829 wrote: post #29
murermader wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I read here on HN some time ago that it is intentionally hard to read to discourage posts with text. I think the reasoning was that posting links to external blogs / websites is usually higher quality than someone creating a quick post on HN. Could be wrong though, just writing this from memory.

HN has some really non-obvious UX, between this and the mysterious green usernames I still don't understand. And the fact that only some users can downvote. Or the weird logic behind which words cannot appear in titles.

A comment has a green username if at the time of commenting the author was new. The colour remains. If you look at your first comments, you will see them green as well.

YCombinator founders have their own colours which are only visible to each other.

There are plenty of undocumented features like this one.

Re: Show HN: PRQL in PostgreSQL

#42

Post by quesera »

snthpy wrote: post #7
lkuty wrote: post #3

I don't understand the need for libraries that abstract away SQL when you could just write SQL directly and have full access to the power of the language which is quite rich (recursive CTE, windowing, ... aka Modern SQL). You could also use stored procedures/functions for more complex stuff and e.g. JSON (or native types) to transfer data between the database and the application. Why limit ourselves with a sub-optima…

This comes up every time PRQL makes it onto HackerNews and is a fair question: Short answer: DX Slightly longer answer: Developer productivity and experience, especially for EDA and interactively writing complex analytical queries. Most people that have tried PRQL just find it more convenient to write their analytical queries in it. PRQL compiles to SQL so it can't express anything you can't already do in SQL, but yo…

Reformatted for readability (indent code blocks with two spaces):

  from tracks
  group album_id (
    sort {-milliseconds}
    take 1
  )
Editorializing:

Data query specification is all about getting the details right. This does not look simpler than the corresponding SQL to me though. All components must be present -- scope, group, limit, order.

SQL, for all its faults, is generally succinct at incorporating the required details. The PRQL sample here is succinct as well, but to me at least, not differentiating.

Re: Show HN: PRQL in PostgreSQL

#43

Post by audunw »

GordonS wrote: post #13
snthpy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comes up every time PRQL makes it onto HackerNews and is a fair question: Short answer: DX Slightly longer answer: Developer productivity and experience, especially for EDA and interactively writing complex analytical queries. Most people that have tried PRQL just find it more convenient to write their analytical queries in it. PRQL compiles to SQL so it can't express anything you can't already do in SQL, but yo…

> How long would it take you to write the SQL for that? I don't want to appear rude, but unless I'm missing something, this is a pretty simple SQL query, of the kind anyone with mimimal SQL experience could write off the top of their head in seconds. I like the idea of PRQL, but I think a better example is needed to sell it.

I have a moderate amount of SQL experince, but I could not write that query at the top of my head. Maybe you misunderstand what the PRQL query is doing?

Here's the SQL it generates:

WITH table_0 AS ( SELECT , ROW_NUMBER() OVER ( PARTITION BY album_id ORDER BY milliseconds DESC ) AS _expr_0 FROM tracks ) SELECT FROM table_0 WHERE _expr_0 If I understand PRQL correctly, it finds the longest song for each album? A simple concept, but not a simple MySQL query.

Re: Show HN: PRQL in PostgreSQL

#44

Post by andix »

lkuty wrote: post #3

I don't understand the need for libraries that abstract away SQL when you could just write SQL directly and have full access to the power of the language which is quite rich (recursive CTE, windowing, ... aka Modern SQL). You could also use stored procedures/functions for more complex stuff and e.g. JSON (or native types) to transfer data between the database and the application. Why limit ourselves with a sub-optima…

Because SQL can be cumbersome to write. It's often repetitive, requires nesting, aliases, and a specific order of statements.

Re: Show HN: PRQL in PostgreSQL

#45

Post by orlp »

gigatexal wrote: post #22
snthpy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comes up every time PRQL makes it onto HackerNews and is a fair question: Short answer: DX Slightly longer answer: Developer productivity and experience, especially for EDA and interactively writing complex analytical queries. Most people that have tried PRQL just find it more convenient to write their analytical queries in it. PRQL compiles to SQL so it can't express anything you can't already do in SQL, but yo…

select id from tracks qualify row_number() over partition by (album_id order by milliseconds desc) =1 That should work Look I’m a diehard SQL just use it guy but open to improvements. But I’m loathe to use abstractions for things when the underlying thing is so expressive. Autocomplete of fields in a good editor, schema help, etc go a long way to making SQL being written raw very nice.

QUALIFY is not part of the SQL standard.

Re: Show HN: PRQL in PostgreSQL

#46

Post by bvrmn »

GordonS wrote: post #13
snthpy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comes up every time PRQL makes it onto HackerNews and is a fair question: Short answer: DX Slightly longer answer: Developer productivity and experience, especially for EDA and interactively writing complex analytical queries. Most people that have tried PRQL just find it more convenient to write their analytical queries in it. PRQL compiles to SQL so it can't express anything you can't already do in SQL, but yo…

> How long would it take you to write the SQL for that? I don't want to appear rude, but unless I'm missing something, this is a pretty simple SQL query, of the kind anyone with mimimal SQL experience could write off the top of their head in seconds. I like the idea of PRQL, but I think a better example is needed to sell it.

I'm not a PRQL fun. But TBH I can't write this SQL from my head. I have thousand lines of written SQL.

Re: Show HN: PRQL in PostgreSQL

#47

Post by xmonkee »

billfruit wrote: post #30

Just out of curiosity, did PRQL evolve from some theoretical innovation or did arise bottom up from practical utilities? Is it a new tool with great new powers or is it just syntactic sugar?

it compiles to SQL so no extra powers. But it does make some common patterns more succinct. They have good documentation on the website.

Personally, I was very excited about using it to write some complex queries in my application that does some fancy backtesting with sliding windows etc, but I reverted back to SQL pretty quickly because I found myself first thinking in SQL and translating back to PRQL :/

Re: Show HN: PRQL in PostgreSQL

#48

Post by dvdkon »

Damn, now my bachelor's thesis will be less unique :)

I'm working on a new language that compiles directly to Postgres' post-analysis structs. It's working out pretty well so far, but my chosen "universal set" (aggregation/array/subquery/... as one thing) semantics are sometimes a pain to encode.

Re: Show HN: PRQL in PostgreSQL

#49

Post by cmpb »

GordonS wrote: post #13
snthpy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comes up every time PRQL makes it onto HackerNews and is a fair question: Short answer: DX Slightly longer answer: Developer productivity and experience, especially for EDA and interactively writing complex analytical queries. Most people that have tried PRQL just find it more convenient to write their analytical queries in it. PRQL compiles to SQL so it can't express anything you can't already do in SQL, but yo…

> How long would it take you to write the SQL for that? I don't want to appear rude, but unless I'm missing something, this is a pretty simple SQL query, of the kind anyone with mimimal SQL experience could write off the top of their head in seconds. I like the idea of PRQL, but I think a better example is needed to sell it.

This "find the latest row for each " query is kind of a poster-child for seemingly-simple but actually difficult to get right/performant sql.

E.g. see: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1313120/retrieving-the-l...

Re: Show HN: PRQL in PostgreSQL

#50

Post by abirch »

snthpy wrote: post #7
lkuty wrote: post #3

I don't understand the need for libraries that abstract away SQL when you could just write SQL directly and have full access to the power of the language which is quite rich (recursive CTE, windowing, ... aka Modern SQL). You could also use stored procedures/functions for more complex stuff and e.g. JSON (or native types) to transfer data between the database and the application. Why limit ourselves with a sub-optima…

This comes up every time PRQL makes it onto HackerNews and is a fair question: Short answer: DX Slightly longer answer: Developer productivity and experience, especially for EDA and interactively writing complex analytical queries. Most people that have tried PRQL just find it more convenient to write their analytical queries in it. PRQL compiles to SQL so it can't express anything you can't already do in SQL, but yo…

This would have been awesome for me 2 years ago.

Currently much of my complicated SQL is generated by a LLM.

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