The text discusses the use of ClickHouse, a database management system, to perform various operations on a dataset. The author starts by importing the NYC taxis dataset and creating a table in ClickHouse using the MergeTree engine. They then demonstrate how to dynamically select columns from the table using regular expressions, apply functions to all or specific columns, replace values in certain columns while leaving others unchanged, and exclude columns from selection. These clauses enable efficient data manipulation without having to manually specify every column of interest.