Malcolm: SQL for the command line: "show"

# select gender, race, sum(income)/count(income);"

for instance. You have to say:

# select gender, race, industry sum(income)/count(id) group by gender, race, industry;

even though there's only one rational way to group the data. In fact. If you leave off any term in the group by statement, most servers will raise an error.

While there's silly redundancy in the select statement, the others have horrible and dangerous defaults, for instance this:

# delete from records;

doesn't raise an error or do nothing, which would be sensible (you didn't specify what to delete!) instead, it deletes *everything* in the table. It'd be like if 'rm's behavior without arguments was to delete every file in the current directory.

Then there's insert's annoying positional syntax, which is both tediously redundant *and* error prone. Plus the 'shortcut' way to do an insert ignores the fact that nearly every table has as its first column an auto-incrementing ID, forcing you to either go to the horrible long-form or use a non-standard workaround if you're lucky enough to be using a server that has one.

Anyway, while his tool is fairly neat I think it might have been more useful if he'd made something to coerce the data into sqlite. It'd have been less work and you don't get stuck with the shell argument escaping horror he demonstrates there.