Function pipelines

Function pipelines are an experimental feature, designed to radically improve the developer ergonomics of analyzing data in Postgres and SQL, by applying principles from functional programming and popular tools like Python's Pandas, and PromQL.

SQL is the best language for data analysis, but it is not perfect, and at times can get quite unwieldy. For example, this query gets data from the last day from the measurements table, sorts the data by the time column, calculates the delta between the values, takes the absolute value of the delta, and then takes the sum of the result of the previous steps:

You can express the same query with a function pipeline like this:

Function pipelines are completely SQL compliant, meaning that any tool that speaks SQL is able to support data analysis using function pipelines.

For more information about how function pipelines work, read our [blog post][blog-function-pipelines].