Is there any syntactic sugar to using group by columns 1,2,3,…,n in SQL?

I know it isn’t a “good way of doing things”, but we use the following notations in many of our SQL queries :

SELECT dim_1,dim_2,...,dim_n,agg_function(metric_1),...agg_function(metric_k)
FROM table
GROUP BY 1,2,...,n

I was wondering if there is an even more succinct way of writing it, e.g. GROUP BY 1-n (Group by col_1 to col_n)

Answer

Assume you have table with dozen or more columns

Consider below template (note below offset is zero-based) for BigQuery – should be perfect for POC type of work you mentioned

select (
    select string_agg(kv)
    from unnest(split(trim(to_json_string(t), '{}'))) kv with offset 
    where offset between 0 and N-1
  ) dims,
  agg_function(metric_1),...agg_function(metric_k)
from `project.dataset.table` t
group by 1      

Below is dummy/simplistic example

with `project.dataset.table` as (
  select 1 col1, '2' col2, 3 col3, 4 col4 union all 
  select 11, '2', 3, 41
)
select 
  (
    select string_agg(kv)
    from unnest(split(trim(to_json_string(t), '{}'))) kv with offset 
    where offset in (1,2)
  ) dims,
  sum(col1) metric1, count(col1) metric2
from `project.dataset.table` t
group by 1 

with output