Subject: [PATCH] GROUP BY ALL

From: David Christensen <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2024 15:55:20 -0500

I see that there'd been some chatter but not a lot of discussion about
a GROUP BY ALL feature/functionality.  There certainly is utility in
such a construct IMHO.

The grammar is unambiguous, so can support this construct in lieu of
the traditional GROUP BY clause.  Enclosed is a patch which adds this
via just scanning the TargetEntry list and adding anything that is not
an aggregate function call to the groupList.

Still need some docs; just throwing this out there and getting some feedback.

Thanks,

David

---

From: Jelte Fennema-Nio <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2024 10:56:43 +0200

> a GROUP BY ALL feature/functionality.  There certainly is utility in

+1 from me. When exploring data, this is extremely useful because you
don't have to update the GROUP BY clause every time

Regarding the arguments against this:
1. I don't think this is any more unreadable than being able to GROUP
BY 1, 2, 3. Or being able to use column aliases from the SELECT in the
GROUP BY clause. Again this is already allowed. Personally I actually
think it's more readable than specifying e.g. 5 columns in the group
by, because then I have to cross-reference with columns in the SELECT
clause to find out if they are the same. With ALL I instantly know
it's grouped by all
2. This is indeed not part of the standard. But we have many things
that are not part of the standard. I think as long as we use the same
syntax as snowflake, databricks and duckdb I personally don't see a
big problem. Then we could try and make this be part of the standard
in the next version of the standard.