[wruza]

This seems reasonable on its own, but then you can add a compound index and forget to join on a second part, or refactor a column in two and only collect one value into aggregation. This spotted babysitting is just stupid. If you’re anxious about query integrity, get some tooling and check your sqls/ddls against some higher-level schema.

Even if that turns out to be a constant source of trouble worth not having, then why SQL can’t provide columnsets at least, so that queries could include, group or join on these predefined sets of columns instead of repeating tens of columns and/or expressions and/or aggregations many times across a single query. You had employees.bio_set=(name, dob), now you add `edu` to it and it just works everywhere, because you think in sets rather than in specific columns. Even group by bio_set works. Heck, I bet most of ORMs partially exist only to generate SQL, because it’s sometimes unbearable as is.