We finish a sneak peek of our upcoming Structured Queries library by showing how queries built with the library can be reused and composed together, and how we can replace all of the raw queries in our application with simpler, safer query builders.

Last week we released SharingGRDB, an alternative to SwiftData powered by SQLite, but there are a few improvements we could make. Let’s take a look at some problems with the current tools before giving a sneak peek at the solution: a powerful new query building library that leverages many advanced Swift features that we will soon build from scratch.

We celebrate 7 years with a live stream! We discuss some recent updates around our popular Sharing library; open source SharingGRDB live, which is a new lightweight alternative to SwiftData that is powered by Sharing and GRDB; and we give a sneak peek of an upcoming series and library.

We tackle one of SQL’s most important aspects in our query builder: the WHERE clause, which filters the results of a query. And we will do so in a type-safe manner that prevents us from writing nonsensical queries in Swift even when they are syntactically valid in SQL.

We add sorting to our SQL builder, which will give us a powerful, succinct syntax for controlling the order of results. We will start small but build up to parameter packs and even a custom result builder to get the most flexibility out of our API.

We now have a type-safe syntax for generating SELECT statements using key paths to the columns we want to select, but while this syntax is nice and what many existing libraries use, we can do better. Let’s introduce a more advanced syntax that leverages variadic generics and supports more complex query expressions.