Hi devs, I am moving our discussion on the PR thread [1] to the dev mailing list to close the loop on the related issue [2]. The end goal of the PR is to support grouping/ordering by via column ordinals. The target implementation (currently there is no flag) should support a flag, so that a user can also use the old behavior as suggested by @Timo.
Some vendors such as Postgres [3], SQLite [4], MySQL/MariaDB [5], Oracle [6], Spark [7], and BigQuery[8] support group/order by clauses with column ordinals. Obviously, supporting this clause might lead to less readable and maintainable SQL code. This might also cause a bit of complications both on the codebase and on the user-experience side. On the other hand, we already see that numerous vendors support this feature out of the box, because there was/is a need for this feature. That is why, I would like to discuss and hear your opinions about introducing/abandoning this feature. Regards, Jeyhun [1] https://github.com/apache/flink/pull/24270 [2] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-34366 [3] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/6.5/sql-select.htm [4] https://www.sqlite.org/lang_select.html [5] https://www.db-fiddle.com/f/uTrfRrNs4uXLr4Q9j2piCk/1 [6] https://oracle-base.com/articles/23/group-by-and-having-clause-using-column-alias-or-column-position-23 [7] https://github.com/apache/spark/commit/90613df652d45e121ab2b3a5bbb3b63cb15d297a [8] https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/reference/standard-sql/query-syntax#group_by_col_ordinals
