I think the answer to this question is “no”, but I’d like to confirm.

Based on the syntax diagram provided in the documentation for CREATE TABLE, I guess that column-name can only accept a string in CREATE TABLE table-name (column-name-0 COLTYPE-A, column-name-1 COL-TYPE-B)`.

But suppose I started with this data:

  types: varchar      date   integer
headers: "hello"     "date"  "value"
   data:    "a"   2024-JAN        0
   data:    "a"   2024-FEB        1

Then I might want to PIVOT it into the following:

  types: varchar   integer   integer
headers: "hello"  2024-JAN  2024-FEB
   data:     "a"         0         1

without destroying the DATE structure of the headers.

After all, perhaps later, I might want to UNPIVOT this data back into the “row-long” format, and it would be nice to not have to reparse the date from a string back into a DATE object?