I don't know what Dimitri can be thinking.
? I'm thinking the power of SQL, of course, and the right way to harness it within 9. To show a user the result of a query, with user-defined parameters--invaluable.
Those are two different things: 1) to have the result of a query be visually "highlighted" on screen, and 2) to enable user-defined parameters. Want to see the result of a query highlighted in a map? Easy: create a drawing from the query. There's an example topic that shows how to do that. Reserving the difference between interactive picking of objects and selection via SQL is a very big deal. It prevents confusion when mixing interactive work with programmatic work. Consider the Mexico drawing and table used in the above example topic link. Write a query: SELECT * FROM [Mexico Table] where Population > 2001187; and create a drawing from that query. Drop that drawing into your map. You can now do interactive selection on that drawing-created-from-a-query with the mouse, such as ctrl-clicking a province to select it. With the focus on that layer in the map, you can even use the Select pane, for example, to Search for records where Automobiles are greater (>) than 200000. Press Preview and you get a preview. Change the action and you can modify the selection. But you can also do different manual picking ("selection") in a query results window or in a window where the drawing based on the query is in its own window and not in a map, and likewise use the Select pane to construct different picked ("selection") sets. All that can get complicated quickly. Visual distinctions between hand picking ("selection") and what's going on in SQL is useful to keep the different techniques clear.
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