Comment by svat

The paper's section 5.1 (“Usage at Google”) and its Figure 4 (page 9) shows the usage growing steadily, “despite limited documentation and incomplete tooling” — of course 1600 users is still small relative to the number of SQL users at Google, and it's possible the growth will plateau at some point, but I for one adopted pipe syntax the very day I saw it (even sent an excited email to their mailing list), and have been using it ever since. As it's an extension, it's always possible to use regular SQL for parts of the same query (copying others' queries etc), but often I find myself rewriting queries into pipe SQL and find it significantly simplifies them (CTEs can be removed, etc).