I'm a SQL newbie so maybe I lack context for this decision, but why did you decide to keep the "SELECT" keyword? Going through your tutorial, SELECT seems redundant and could just be dropped without any loss of information. In that way look a lot more like most non-SQL languages. Why do I need to SELECT "string" instead of just "string"?

Off the top of my head: EdgeQL grammar is relatively complex and we need SELECT to disambiguate in many corner cases.

I'm trying to understand how this tutorial works, I noticed it doesn't make any network requests when run one of the examples, but then if I edit the code in an example it does make a request. Is this the magic of next.js and server-side components at work, and do you have a real edgedb running on the server side that is used to pre-render the page and also handle updates? I would love to hear more about how this setup works and even look at the code if it's available.

You guessed everything right: we run an instance to prerender and cache at the build time and at runtime we query when the query has been changed