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A comment on Shouldn't FROM come before SELECT in SQL? (2011). Parent comment

Re:Shouldn't FROM come before SELECT in SQL? (2011) by jacques_chester on Thursday January 25, 2024 @10:35AM (#39130607)
> This is valid SQL.

> SELECT 1;

Something like Oracle's "dual" table would handle this corner case. Or just selecting a value from itself:

    FROM 1 SELECT 1;
or

    FROM ::integer SELECT 1;
Or whathaveyou. In any case, the SELECT 1 case isn't fatal to putting FROM first, merely annoying.

> Intelligent tooling can and does already solve this.

It can progressively guess as you type, but it can't provide an upfront list of alternatives for autocompletion. That is an annoyance.

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Re:Shouldn't FROM come before SELECT in SQL? (2011) by WorldMaker on Thursday January 25, 2024 @10:57AM (#39130898)
Given how often `SELECT ` is already the developer "default" especially in debugging and REPL work there's a good case that `SELECT ` can truly just be the implied default case and something like `FROM 1` makes perfect sense as a standalone statement.
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Re:Shouldn't FROM come before SELECT in SQL? (2011) by jacques_chester on Thursday January 25, 2024 @11:54AM (#39131684)
Even neater.

DuckDB has an implicit "SELECT *" if you just give it "FROM tablename", which fits your example.

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Re:Shouldn't FROM come before SELECT in SQL? (2011) by chrisjc on Thursday January 25, 2024 @12:17PM (#39131982)
But interestingly DuckDB doesn't support `SELECT 'FOO' AS BAR FROM DUAL;` or `SELECT 'FOO' AS BAR FROM 1;`.

Which I guess makes sense if it has an implicit `SELECT *`.

What would the implicit projection of `FROM DUAL;` be?

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Re:Shouldn't FROM come before SELECT in SQL? (2011) by WorldMaker on Thursday January 25, 2024 @02:35PM (#39134049)
From my experience of Oracle `FROM DUAL;` projection would give you on a coin flip either an empty table or a stacktrace error from some Java library.
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