[thorax]

RE: syntax For casual use, I kinda always liked the whole MATCH/AGAINST syntax for old school Innodb, though obviously things have changed a lot since those days. But it felt less like calling embedded functions and more like extending SQL’s grammar.

Regarding the rest, it seems like a reasonable approach at first tinker.

[tullie]

Makes sense. Implementation simplicity was part of the reason we didn't go for this. Currently the language is a transpiler, which maps SELECT and FROM into the retrieval stages, WHERE as post-filter stage, ORDER BY as score stage and REORDER BY to the final stage reranker. Because the text lookup is pushed through to the retriever we put it there. In the future we'll have more logic in the language compilation process which means that we can move things around a bit and under the hood they all get pushed to where they need to anyway.