Hey Jacques,

The first option feels more natural to me, but I’m not sure I understand your 
point regarding how an alias would render it meaningless. Could you explain 
that?

Thanks,
A

> On Oct 3, 2015, at 8:54 AM, Jacques Nadeau <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Hey All,
> 
> One of the use cases that we're trying to solve in Drill is unrolling an
> inner map. This is used frequently since various types of outputs from UDFs
> are maps. Imagine a situation where records are effectively:
> 
> {
>  id: 123,
>  b: {
>    x:10,
>    y:20
>  }
> }
> 
> We want to the output of the operation to be
> 
> {
>  id: 123,
>  x: 10,
>  y:20
> }
> 
> This is frequently useful if you want to present data to a bi tool. The
> question is, what is the right way to express this concept in SQL? The two
> ideas I have are:
> 
> select t.id, t.b.* from t;
> 
> OR
> 
> select t.id, t.b as * from t
> 
> The first seems to fit well with the existing pattern around * from SQL.
> However, we would need to validate that there was no use of an alias since
> that would be meaningless in this context. Thinking about that led me to
> the second idea.
> 
> Any other thoughts/proposals? What do other people think?

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