Personally I think that's worse. SQL - which is almost ubiqutous - already suffers from a fragmentation problem because of the complex and dated standardization setup. When I learn a new DBMS the two questions I ask at the very start are: 1. what common but non-standard features are supported? 2. what new anchor-features (often cool but also often intended to lock me to the vendor) am I going to pick up?

First I need to learn a new (even easy & familiar) language, second I need to be aware of what's proprietary & locks me to the vendor platform. I'd suspect they see the second as a benefit they get IF they can convince people to accept the first.

> table names, columns, virtual columns

This sounds solvable with clickhouse views?

> automatic joins

Is this also not solvable with views? Also, clickhouse heavily discourages joins so I wonder how often this winds up being beneficial? For us, we only ever join against tenant metadata (i.e. resolving ID to name)

> query optimization

This sounds potentially interesting - clickhouse's query optimizer is not great IME, but it's definitely getting better