I find sq handy when you use it to accomplish things you can't (easily) do with just raw SQL. Things like: exporting certain rows to JSON or CSV, transforming rows into nicely formatted log lines for viewing, or reading in a CSV file and querying it the same way you'd query other databases. It's particularly easy to start using if you're already familiar with the jq.

If you use things like `array_to_json(array_agg(row_to_json(....)))` in your psql commands to output some rows to JSON, then sq's `--json` or `--jsonl` is quite a bit easier IMHO. If you know the exact SQL query you want to run you can just do `sq sql '....'` as well, but I agree there's not much point in doing that if you aren't taking advantage of some other sq feature.

You may know this already, but the SQLite CLI can actually read and query data directly from a csv file, with the right flags

They are Jedi’s at jq though.

I agree with @candiddevmike. Might I add that you can do those things fairly easily now with ChatGPT/Claude. I doubt LLMs know how to use Sq.io that much.

> I'm not really seeing anything I can't do with standard SQL and CLI tools like psql.

Developer here. There's a few features other than the query stuff that I still think are pretty handy.

The "sq inspect" stuff isn't easy to do with the standard CLI tools, or at least wasn't when I started working on sq back in 2013 or so.

https://sq.io/docs/inspect

I also regularly make use of the ability to diff the metadata/schema of different DB instances (e.g. "sq diff @pg_prod @pg_qa").

https://sq.io/docs/diff