🎉 0.3.0 is the biggest ever change in PRQL's compiler 🎉. It rewrites much of the internals: the compiler now has a semantic understanding of expressions, including resolving names & building a DAG of column lineage.

While the immediate changes to the language are modest — some long-running bugs are fixed — this unlocks beginning development of many of the broad features we've had ambitions for, such as type-checking & auto-complete. And it simplifies building our next language features, such as match-case expressions, unions & table expressions.

@aljazerzen has (mostly single-handedly) done this work over the past few months. The project owes him immense appreciation.

Breaking changes:

We've had to make some modest breaking changes for 0.3:

• Pipelines must start with from. For example, a pipeline with only derive foo = 5, with no from transform, is no longer valid. Depending on demand for this feature, it would be possible to add this back.

• Shared column names now require == in a join. For example:

  from employees
  -join positions [id]
  +join positions [==id]
  

  The existing approach is ambiguous to the compiler — id could be a boolean column.

• Table references containing periods must be surrounded by backticks. For example, when referencing a schema name:

  -from public.sometable
  +from `public.sometable`
  

Features:

• Change self equality op to == (#1176, @aljazerzen)
• Add logging (@aljazerzen)
• Add clickhouse dialect (#1090, @max-sixty)
• Allow namespaces & tables to contain . (#1079, @aljazerzen)

Fixes:

• Deduplicate column appearing in SELECT multiple times (#1186, @aljazerzen)
• Fix uppercase table names (#1184, @aljazerzen)
• Omit table name when only one ident in SELECT (#1094, @aljazerzen)

Documentation:

• Add chapter on semantics' internals (@aljazerzen, #1028)
• Add note about nesting variables in s-strings (@max-sixty, #1163)

Internal changes:

• Flatten group and window (#1120, @aljazerzen)
• Split ast into expr and stmt (@aljazerzen)
• Refactor associativity (#1156, @aljazerzen)
• Rename Ident constructor to from_name (#1084, @aljazerzen)
• Refactor rq folding (#1177, @aljazerzen)
• Add tests for reported bugs fixes in semantic (#1174, @aljazerzen)
• Bump duckdb from 0.5.0 to 0.6.0 (#1132)
• Bump once_cell from 1.15.0 to 1.16.0 (#1101)
• Bump pest from 2.4.0 to 2.5.0 (#1161)
• Bump pest_derive from 2.4.0 to 2.5.0 (#1179)
• Bump sqlparser from 0.25.0 to 0.27.0 (#1131)
• Bump trash from 2.1.5 to 3.0.0 (#1178)