topic Re: Databricks SQL editor - we can get a long way with a few Quality of Life improvements in Warehousing & Analytics

Databricks SQL editor - we can get a long way with a few Quality of Life improvements

QueryingQuagga — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 07:36:57 GMT

Hello all (and, if you are watching these posts, Databricks employees/representatives 🙂 ),

I hope you take this idea into account - I haven't been able to find a place where one can vote on features, but I believe that this idea would make very real impact for all your customers using the SQL Editor.

One thing that I've been missing for along time in the SQL editor, and this has been a returning discussion point among a lot of other people I know, is:

- A simple and powerful way to get statistics from shown editor output.

I'm thinking about the ability to more easily mark certain cells and get statistics from the selection calculated by the browser:

1. count of cells marked

2. distinct count of cells marked

3. sum of numeric cells marked

4. min / max numeric of cells marked

5. timespan for date, datetime, and time cells marked (e.g. from t0 inclusive to t1 exclusive = 1 day) + earliest / latest date, datetime, time when selecting 2 or more cells

6. Maybe there are interesting statistics for VARIANT type columns (I don't know about performance here with large cell contents)

This would also apply for when selecting the column header (selecting all rows for the column) and when selecting multiple column headers (selecting all rows for multiple columns) as well as when selecting individual cells.

I do get that performance in the browser has to be considered as well, but so much troubleshooting with low volume data is being done in the editor and having these statistics readily available would make an enourmous improvement to workflow.

Re: Databricks SQL editor - we can get a long way with a few Quality of Life improvements

QueryingQuagga — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 09:59:05 GMT

Although this is not getting any visibility, I've got another feature idea to add:

* Colour coding or otherwise marking columns to reflect table relation

In a simple join between e.g. table "cart" and table "cartItems", columns from "cart" would be marked by colour or watermark with "cart" name (and the same for "cartItems"). This way you can more easily keep track of column relations when writing queries.

Re: Databricks SQL editor - we can get a long way with a few Quality of Life improvements

stbjelcevic — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 19:16:04 GMT

Hi @QueryingQuagga ,

We always appreciate feature requests! If you are working with an account team, you can always pass this information along to them, they have the ability to submit feature requests and vote on existing feature requests as well. It is one of the ways the roadmap for our product team is influenced.