Comment by cryptonector

You can always turn a HAVING in SQL into a WHERE by wrapping the SELECT that has the GROUP BY in another SELECT that has the WHERE that would have been the HAVING if you hadn't bothered.

You don't need a |> operator to make this possible. Your point is that there is a reason that SQL didn't just allow two WHERE clauses, one before and one after GROUP BY: to make it clearer syntactically.

Whereas the sort of proposal made by TFA is that if you think of the query as a sequence of steps to execute then you don't need the WHERE vs. HAVING clue because you can see whether a WHERE comes before or after GROUP BY in some query.

But the whole point of SQL is to _not have to_ think of how the query is to be implemented. Which I think brings us back to: it's better to have HAVING. But it's true also that it's better to allow arbitrary ordering of some clauses: there is no reason that FROM/JOIN, SELECT, ORDER BY / LIMIT have to be in the order that they are -- only WHERE vs. GROUP BY ordering matters, and _only_ if you insist on using WHERE for pre- and post-GROUP BY, but if you don't then all clauses can come in any order you like (though all table sources should come together, IMO).

So all in all I agree with you: keep HAVING.