[djk447]

(NB: Post author here)

Yeah. CTEs definitely make it a bit easier to read, though some people get more confused by them, especially because they don't exist in all SQL variants.

And totally agree with that last bit! We want to see if it's useful for folks, it's released experimentally now and we'll see what folks can do with it. One thing that's fun and that we may do a post explaining a bit more is that these pipelines are actually values as well, so the transforms that you run can be stored in a column in the database as well.

And that starts offering some really mind-bending stuff. The example I used was building on the one in the post except now you have thermocouples with different calibration curves. You can actually store a polynomial or other calibration curve in a column and apply the correct calibration to each individual thermocouple with a JOIN...which is kinda crazy, but pretty awesome. So we want to figure out how to use these and what people can do with them and see where it takes us.

[jpitz]

They've been around quite a long time, but yeah it seems like only SQL89 gets taught.

Window Functions and CTEs are both major force multipliers in the language, so I always encourage folks to go learn them.