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You could improve type ahead by just pouring effort into the IDE. Especially with the amount of resources we have nowadays. Easy enough to have basic typeahead on basically all possible columns when writing the select, and then you could use the columns as a filter on the tables during auto complete.

In general, this isn't done. But I don't see any technical reason it can't be done.




This strikes me as solving the wrong problem. It's not as useful to be able to derive a table from selected columns -- the desire is to complete columns from a table. It's both more intuitive and helps the user more than once.


I disagree. Folks often know what column they want, and have to find the table that best gives it.


If you have multiple tables, how do you avoid suggesting a wrong column, before filling out the table name?

You could suggest all columns up front, and then afterwards tell the user “this suggestion doesn’t exist”, which would just erode trust in the autocomplete.


Start typing “SEL”, ide suggests “SELECT _ FROM”, you press enter and the above text is entered, while the cursor is placed after from. You write that part of the query and after pressing enter it will jump back to the select part.

This is done already by Jetbrain’s datagrip for example.


Suggest all. And with modern UIs, you can hint the table with the column.




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