Comment by creatonez

> I think this new syntax is more imperative (you tell the DB "how" to get you the data). The old syntax is more declarative (you tell the DB "what" you need).

I think this syntax could accidentally give the impression that this is what's happening, but it's still an abstraction thanks to the optimizer. The "how" a pipe syntax describes roughly aligns with how a human would naturally want to construct a machinated process to sort through a file cabinet. Which may have been why it's been such a big hit for Unix and functional programming, despite poorly mapping to the machine model before the optimizations of modern OSes and functional compilers came along.

Any choice whatsoever might give a false impression of the machine model. Maybe SQL is doing the right thing by essentially having its syntax elements in random order, thwarting any attempts by developers to relate what they are typing to what is actually happening, but I think the authors of this paper are right in their desire to make it more ergonomic.