I was not there at the original design decisions of the language, but I imagine it was there specifically to help the person writing/editing the query easily recognize and interpret filtering before or after an aggregation. The explicitness makes debugging a query much easier and ensures it fails earlier. I don't see much reason to stop distinguishing one use case from the other, I'm not sure how that helps anything.

I think this stems from the non-linear approach to reading a SQL statement. If it were top-to-bottom linear, like PRQL, then the distinction does not seem merited. It would then always be filtering from what you have collected up to this line.

I think the original sin here is not making aggregation an explicitly separate thing, even though it should be. Adding a count(*) fundamentally changes what the query does, and what it returns, and what restrictions apply.

I also wasn't there, but I think this actually wasn't to help authors and instead was a workaround for the warts of SQL. It's a pain to write

    SELECT * FROM (SELECT * FROM ... GROUP BY ...) t WHERE ...

and they decided this was common enough that they would introduce a HAVING clause for this case

    SELECT * FROM ... GROUP BY ... HAVING ...

But the real issue is that in order to make operations in certain orders, SQL requires you to use subselects, which require restating a projection for no reason and a lot of syntactical ceremony. E.g. you must give the FROM item a name (t), but it's not required for disambiguation.

Another common case is projecting before the filter. E.g. you want to reuse a complicated expression in the SELECT and WHERE clauses. Standard SQL requires you to repeat it or use a subselect since the WHERE clause is evaluated first.

Indeed. Just as I think git’s N different ways to refer to the same operation was a blunder.

But pre- and post- aggregation filtering is not really "the same" operation.

If I use a CTE and filter the aggregate, feels the same to me.

If you perform an aggregation query in a CTE, then filter on that in a subsequent query, that is different, because you have also added another SELECT and FROM. You would use WHERE in that case whether using a CTE or just an outer query on an inner subquery. HAVING is different from WHERE because it filters after the aggregation, without requiring a separate query with an extra SELECT.

> HAVING is different from WHERE because it filters after the aggregation, without requiring a separate query with an extra SELECT.

Personally I rarely use HAVING and instead use WHERE with subqueries for the following reasons:

1-I don't like repeating/duplicating a bunch of complex calcs, easier to just do WHERE in outer query on result

2-I typically have outer queries anyway for multiple reasons: break logic into reasonable chunks for humans, also for join+performance reasons (to give the optimizer a better chance at not getting confused)

The main (only?) task I routinely use HAVING for is finding duplicates.