I love the production, it's artistic and lovable, and avoids perfectionism.
The game also reminds me that the most frustrating aspect of working with SQL is navigating the results. This is mostly a UI issue, and I don't think it's solved. Scrollbars are bad, terminal output is clunky, hard to flip between table output (not helpful for cols with long content) and sections (makes comparison and overview hard), and the fact that changes to it require lots of changes in the query (shortening, mapping), just for exploring. This is made worse by the necessity to edit complex multiline statement in an interactive shell with poor editing support. Personally, I still prefer using Emacs on a file in SQL mode, in combination with an iSQL shell buffer. You collect various queries in a file, and copy the statement under the cursor to the shell for execution. An easy way to keep a collection of queries like a library or tool belt, in a way that can also be persisted and versioned.
Thanks for the kind words! All good points about the clunkiness, most of the UX improvements I added came from my frustrations just while developing the game and testing correct answers but I agree it's far from fluid.
TBH eventually this just became an exercise in me resisting further scope creep, haha
The game also reminds me that the most frustrating aspect of working with SQL is navigating the results. This is mostly a UI issue, and I don't think it's solved. Scrollbars are bad, terminal output is clunky, hard to flip between table output (not helpful for cols with long content) and sections (makes comparison and overview hard), and the fact that changes to it require lots of changes in the query (shortening, mapping), just for exploring. This is made worse by the necessity to edit complex multiline statement in an interactive shell with poor editing support. Personally, I still prefer using Emacs on a file in SQL mode, in combination with an iSQL shell buffer. You collect various queries in a file, and copy the statement under the cursor to the shell for execution. An easy way to keep a collection of queries like a library or tool belt, in a way that can also be persisted and versioned.