[tstack]

I work on a TUI logfile viewer that uses SQLite as a backend for doing analysis on the log messages (https://lnav.org). However, writing SQL interactively is painful since you can't really provide good auto-complete or preview, which is something I try to provide for most other operations.

The PRQL pipeline syntax would make for a much better experience for lnav since you're able to progressively refine a query without having to jump around. (You've probably noticed that many log services, like Sumologic, already provide a pipeline-style syntax instead of something SQL-like.) The nice thing is that you can simply keep typing to get the results you want and get a preview at each stage. For example, entering "from" and then pressing <TAB> would make it clear to the program that table-names should be suggested. The program could then show the first few lines of the table. Typing "from syslog_log | filter " and then pressing <TAB> would make it clear that columns from the syslog_log table should be suggested (along with some other expression stuff). And, then, the preview of the filtered output could be shown.

In the current implementation, pressing <TAB> just suggests every possible thing in the universe, whether it's appropriate or not. This leaves the poor with not much help after they've typed "SELECT". I find myself having to lookup docs/source to figure out column names or whatever and I wrote the darn thing. Ultimately, I think the analysis functionality just doesn't get used because interactively writing SQL is so user-hostile. So, I'm looking forward to seeing this succeed so that I can integrate it and still be able to use SQLite in the backend.