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Concepts

Read this section before writing a query. Concepts is deliberately short — the goal is to give you just enough mental model to recognize when you are fighting the API (and should stop) versus when you are using it the way it was designed.

In this section​

  • What is QAL? — the shape of the query language, in one page.
  • Why QAL, not SQL? — the problems QAL was designed to solve. Read this especially if you are SQL-fluent and wondering why we did not just expose MySQL.
  • Materials, Views, Result — the three moving parts every QAL query is built from.
  • Versioning philosophy — how version and update relate, and why since tags matter for AI clients.