Comment by blaisio

We can do so much better! The problem really is, even if you have a nicer more expressive language that cross-compiles to SQL, it's really easy to end up with things that are impossible write in some databases. Even though SQL is based on Math, so it should "just work", the syntax is badly designed, and it is tied up with database consistency models, so it is easy to write something that should be possible but isn't. We can probably make much better compromises in a different language, but it is unclear how we could efficiently do backwards compatibility given all the existing databases and database clients.