Pipelined Relational Query Language, pronounced "Prequel".
PRQL is a modern language for transforming data — a simple, powerful, pipelined SQL replacement. Like SQL, it's readable, explicit and declarative. Unlike SQL, it forms a logical pipeline of transformations, and supports abstractions such as variables and functions. It can be used with any database that uses SQL, since it compiles to SQL.
PRQL can be as simple as:
from tracks filter artist == "Bob Marley" # Each line transforms the previous result aggregate { # `aggregate` reduces each column to a value plays = sum plays, longest = max length, shortest = min length, # Trailing commas are allowed }
Here's a larger example of the language:
from employees filter start_date > @2021-01-01 # Clear date syntax derive { # `derive` adds columns / variables gross_salary = salary + (tax ?? 0), # Terse coalesce gross_cost = gross_salary + benefits_cost, # Variables can use other variables } filter gross_cost > 0 group {title, country} ( # `group` runs a pipeline over each group aggregate { # `aggregate` reduces each group to a value average gross_salary, sum_gross_cost = sum gross_cost, # `=` sets a column name } ) filter sum_gross_cost > 100_000 # `filter` replaces both of SQL's `WHERE` & `HAVING` derive id = f"{title}_{country}" # F-strings like Python derive country_code = s"LEFT(country, 2)" # S-strings allow using SQL as an escape hatch sort {sum_gross_cost, -country} # `-country` means descending order take 1..20 # Range expressions (also valid here as `take 20`)
For more on the language, more examples & comparisons with SQL, visit prql-lang.org. To experiment with PRQL in the browser, check out PRQL Playground.
Current Status - March 2025PRQL is ready to use by the intrepid, either with our supported integrations, or within your own tools, using one of our supported language bindings.
PRQL still has some bugs and some missing features, and is probably only ready to be rolled out to non-technical teams for fairly simple queries.
Development has slowed in the past few months as we decide how to work on a new resolver, which will let us squash many bugs and simplify our code a lot. It'll also let us scale the language without scaling the complexity of the compiler.
While we figure that out, we're also thinking about:
And:
window
transform.We're increasingly open to contributions for bigger rewrites of the resolver given how bottlenecked we are on it. If you're interested in contributing, please reach out in an issue or on Discord.
To stay in touch with PRQL:
This repo is composed of:
It also contains our testing / CI infrastructure and development tools. Check out our development docs for more details.
Many thanks to those who've made our progress possible:
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