That's great, but the statefulness of trying something is still a problem. It would still be nice to be able to wrap a whole change or set of changes with a guarantee that I'll be able to view the outcome without a state change in the database. This nicety is compounded by the fact that I'm often working with datasets that take a few hours to get set up before I can even evaluate. There are a ton of other guard rails I can set up to make that turnaround less shitty, but even cloning a backup database in the worst case is painful. There's no reason the expressiveness of SQL can't embrace complex expressions as a single statement to encapsulate a whole transaction in a single expression. CTEs already do most of that, they just don't have any transactional capability.

Edit: I also don't just use psql, because having normal editing controls that I'm used to in my operating system is muscle memory I leverage and also error prone if I try to use the wrong tool with the wrong muscle memory. I know how to move a caret around every single Mac app, but it works differently the moment I enter anything other than emacs in my terminal.

> You can inspect the changes in flight by inserting a select-statement

All true, but you still can't express a transaction as a single expression.

> Interesting, Hacker News's user interface puts no reply link below your comment. So I could not reply directly. I guess it allows only so many nested replies. This is probably an optimization for readability or to avoid flamewars

They just hide the reply link at a certain depth of threading. You can navigate to the parent comment (by parent link or datestamp depending) and reply.