Just FYI your statement for the checkmate state in the opera game appears to be incorrect

“Pivot tables”: I often have a list of dates, then categories that I want to become columns. SQL can’t do that so there is a technique of spreading values to each column then doing a MAX of each value per date. It is clumsy and verbose but works perfectly… as long as categories are known in advance and fixed. There should be an SQL instruction to pivot those rows into columns.

Example: SELECT date, category, metric; -- I want to show 1 row per date only, with each category as a column.

``` SELECT date,

MAX( CASE category WHEN ‘page_hits’ THEN metric END ) as “Page Hits”,

MAX( CASE category WHEN ‘user_count’ THEN metric END ) as “User Count”

GROUP BY date;

^ Without MAX and GROUP BY: 2026-03-30 Value1 NULL 2026-03-30 NULL Value2 2026-03-31 Value1 NULL (etc) The MAX just merges all rows of the same date. ```

SQL should just have an instruction like: SELECT date, PIVOT(category, metric); to display as many columns as categories.

This thought should be extended for more than 2 dimensions.